4 ms·

How to Fix Our Education System

12 points by babyshake 17y ago

tokenadult 17y ago
I read this in the print edition this afternoon. The expert panel identify one problem with education reform: lack of incentives that will move the key actors who could make things better. "MR. MURRAY: When NIH funding discovers some protein that will cure some disease, it gets snapped up in a heartbeat by big pharmaceutical companies who capitalize on it and make it widely available at a profit. When we have lots of successful experiments in education, the mechanisms for transmitting that success to the broader system don't seem to work very well. Why? "MR. KLEIN: In part because there are not competitive influences that drive it. In a public-delivery system like ours, competition is not typically a driver."
- timwiseman 17y ago
  That seems to be the core of the argument of the article. In particular, it seems to drive at saying we need to be able to have more variation in teacher pay in order to attract the best talent, particularly in the STEM areas.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Studies have been done (Kohn cites one in "The Folly Of Merit Pay") that show more teachers are driven out of teaching by the unintended negative consequences of performance-based pay than are attracted to it by the prospect of more money. It's not hard to see why. Every performance measurement scheme we have today, from federal, state, and municipal school grading to "value-added" schemes, has produced a nightmare of standardized testing and teach-the-test regimes that have crowded out experiments from curricula. You don't have to agree with Alfie Kohn to recognize the problem. Saying "we need to compensate the best teachers to incentivize them" is like saying "we need cars that consume far less gasoline". It's the "how" that's the question.
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      You don't have to agree with Alfie Kohn to recognize the problem. You also don't have to disagree with Alfie Kohn about his ideas on "performance pay" to think that it makes sense in the New York City job market to pay a math teacher more than, say, a social studies teacher. To get a decent math teacher at all probably requires a salary sufficient to draw a math-knowledgeable person away from private-sector opportunities.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        I agree with that, for whatever it's worth.
    - timwiseman 17y ago
      Studies have been done (Kohn cites one in "The Folly Of Merit Pay") that show more teachers are driven out of teaching by the unintended negative consequences of performance-based pay than are attracted to it by the prospect of more money. That certainly makes sense, but the question addressed in this article was not quantity but quality. Which one attracts a higher caliber of teacher (for whichever definition of higher caliber is being used at the moment)?
- hristov 17y ago
  It is very hard to have incentives and competitive influences in education. It is just the nature of education -- the result of a good or bad education is not immediately obvious. If you buy a TV you will know soon after you use it whether it is a good or a bad TV. Not so much with your kids. Although, a very bad school may be immediately obvious a lot of mediocre ones will not be and they will not be distinguishable from very good ones. So, unfortunately, one cannot use general competition to make schools better. One has to rely on teachers and administrators desire to do good.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    It's also a well-known factoid that the best developers outperform the worst by a factor of 10, and yet despite huge incentives to develop a reliable scheme to rate developers, none exists. Just because we "need" to segment the good teachers (or developers, or doctors) from the bad doesn't mean we can.
    - HistoryInAction 17y ago
      One key thing is that students get advanced from grade to grade /no matter what/, unless they drop out. Students have little immediate incentive to work to succeed, and social pressure seems set up to disincentivize students towards learning. One possibility I've thought of is that there should be early separation of students into high and low performers to 'scare' parents into pushing their kids towards the 'high' performance. If you can't succeed, you can't, but if you don't try, you'll never get anywhere. Nothing wrong (and a lot right) with vocational education, but so many kids waste money on a college education that they're not able to take advantage of.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        Studies of social promotion also appear to indicate that holding kids back a grade has worse outcomes than simply moving them forward. Now, it may be that the outcome for those kids is better, but the outcome for their class is worse. Either way, it shows to go you that the simple observations ("they just let the kids finish the grade, even though they don't know the material!") don't carry much insight.
camccann 17y ago
I don't buy the assumption that the biggest problem is teacher quality. Hasn't it been repeatedly shown that, statistically, the factors that most strongly predict a child's academic success are far and away related to their family, not their school? Of course, getting up in public to say "these kids are failing school--and it's their parents' fault" doesn't really advance anyone's political agenda.
- steveplace 17y ago
  I don't buy the assumption that the biggest problem is teacher quality. It's half and half. My wife has a 2nd and 4th block, same material, same environment, except the latter has such a poor group dynamic that they significantly underperform the other class. Variables here are time, teacher fatigue, blood sugar, and the students. I feel that the last factor has the greatest effect. And I totally agree with the fact that there's an abdication of responsibility from the parent/guardian(s) in that they feel the intrinsic motivation for the student ought to be provided by the state. But then we have teachers who have tenure that play videos all day. Good times.
  - camccann 17y ago
    Variables here are time, teacher fatigue, blood sugar, and the students. I'd say that, at least up to some age, any problems attributable to "the students" are really the failing of the parents, though maybe that's what you were getting at. I agree that some teachers aren't really helping matters any, but without good parental influence I don't think improving teacher quality is going to accomplish all that much.
- teeja 17y ago
  "I don't buy the assumption that the biggest problem is teacher quality." Me either. The biggest problem is the institution (embodied to an extent by administration.) Most teachers are qualified, hard-working. They suffer under 'overhead' like most of us do. The last thing educators need is a 'solution' from the WSJ.
pragmatic 17y ago
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/ http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/ The economic system is sending a strong signal. When you can just get by in school, become a banker and still make the equivalent of an engineer, you'd be almost foolish to go with the match/science degree. Can you do that in India/China/other third world country?
- pragmatic 17y ago
  To clarify, I'm saying that students in a third world country have a much greater incentive to study the hard sciences. If you're brother in law can't get a job in his bank then the only way out of poverty is to study hard. Even in relatively poor areas of the country (midwest, south) you can make a very good living as a banker (loan officer, etc).
neovive 17y ago
Instead of focusing so much on standardized testing, we need to start valuing creativity, ingenuity and communication. Just because a school can increase test scores year-over-year, does not mean that the graduating students will make the country more competitive. In fact, so much emphasis on standardized testing is likely to produce less innovation as students and teachers are forced to teach within very strict models. Unfortunately, it is hard to measure creative output, but very easy to measure test scores. I recall reading a while back about the Gates Foundation funding the creation of new schools that focus on team work and creative problem solving. This seemed to be the right approach.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  I recall reading a while back about the Gates Foundation funding the creation of new schools that focus on team work and creative problem solving. Yes, whatever happened to that attempt?
- anamax 17y ago
  > Instead of focusing so much on standardized testing, we need to start valuing creativity, ingenuity and communication. Just because a school can increase test scores year-over-year, does not mean that the graduating students will make the country more competitive. The idea that "valuing creativity, ingenuity and communication" more will make the country more competitive is appealing, but how about turning it into a scientific theory. You know, testable and falsifiable. Failure to take those steps gets us useless twaddle like self-esteem programs. BTW - If you do succeed, you get to compete with the twaddle for educational resources. Sorry about that.
known 17y ago
I believe we need more schools of type http://www.olin.edu/ http://www.olin.edu/

12 points by babyshake 17y ago

I read this in the print edition this afternoon. The expert panel identify one problem with education reform: lack of incentives that will move the key actors who could make things better. "MR. MURRAY: When NIH funding discovers some protein that will cure some disease, it gets snapped up in a heartbeat by big pharmaceutical companies who capitalize on it and make it widely available at a profit. When we have lots of successful experiments in education, the mechanisms for transmitting that success to the broader system don't seem to work very well. Why? "MR. KLEIN: In part because there are not competitive influences that drive it. In a public-delivery system like ours, competition is not typically a driver."

timwiseman 17y ago
That seems to be the core of the argument of the article. In particular, it seems to drive at saying we need to be able to have more variation in teacher pay in order to attract the best talent, particularly in the STEM areas.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Studies have been done (Kohn cites one in "The Folly Of Merit Pay") that show more teachers are driven out of teaching by the unintended negative consequences of performance-based pay than are attracted to it by the prospect of more money. It's not hard to see why. Every performance measurement scheme we have today, from federal, state, and municipal school grading to "value-added" schemes, has produced a nightmare of standardized testing and teach-the-test regimes that have crowded out experiments from curricula. You don't have to agree with Alfie Kohn to recognize the problem. Saying "we need to compensate the best teachers to incentivize them" is like saying "we need cars that consume far less gasoline". It's the "how" that's the question.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    You don't have to agree with Alfie Kohn to recognize the problem. You also don't have to disagree with Alfie Kohn about his ideas on "performance pay" to think that it makes sense in the New York City job market to pay a math teacher more than, say, a social studies teacher. To get a decent math teacher at all probably requires a salary sufficient to draw a math-knowledgeable person away from private-sector opportunities.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      I agree with that, for whatever it's worth.
  - timwiseman 17y ago
    Studies have been done (Kohn cites one in "The Folly Of Merit Pay") that show more teachers are driven out of teaching by the unintended negative consequences of performance-based pay than are attracted to it by the prospect of more money. That certainly makes sense, but the question addressed in this article was not quantity but quality. Which one attracts a higher caliber of teacher (for whichever definition of higher caliber is being used at the moment)?
hristov 17y ago
It is very hard to have incentives and competitive influences in education. It is just the nature of education -- the result of a good or bad education is not immediately obvious. If you buy a TV you will know soon after you use it whether it is a good or a bad TV. Not so much with your kids. Although, a very bad school may be immediately obvious a lot of mediocre ones will not be and they will not be distinguishable from very good ones. So, unfortunately, one cannot use general competition to make schools better. One has to rely on teachers and administrators desire to do good.
- tptacek 17y ago
  It's also a well-known factoid that the best developers outperform the worst by a factor of 10, and yet despite huge incentives to develop a reliable scheme to rate developers, none exists. Just because we "need" to segment the good teachers (or developers, or doctors) from the bad doesn't mean we can.
  - HistoryInAction 17y ago
    One key thing is that students get advanced from grade to grade /no matter what/, unless they drop out. Students have little immediate incentive to work to succeed, and social pressure seems set up to disincentivize students towards learning. One possibility I've thought of is that there should be early separation of students into high and low performers to 'scare' parents into pushing their kids towards the 'high' performance. If you can't succeed, you can't, but if you don't try, you'll never get anywhere. Nothing wrong (and a lot right) with vocational education, but so many kids waste money on a college education that they're not able to take advantage of.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Studies of social promotion also appear to indicate that holding kids back a grade has worse outcomes than simply moving them forward. Now, it may be that the outcome for those kids is better, but the outcome for their class is worse. Either way, it shows to go you that the simple observations ("they just let the kids finish the grade, even though they don't know the material!") don't carry much insight.

camccann 17y ago

I don't buy the assumption that the biggest problem is teacher quality. Hasn't it been repeatedly shown that, statistically, the factors that most strongly predict a child's academic success are far and away related to their family, not their school? Of course, getting up in public to say "these kids are failing school--and it's their parents' fault" doesn't really advance anyone's political agenda.

steveplace 17y ago
I don't buy the assumption that the biggest problem is teacher quality. It's half and half. My wife has a 2nd and 4th block, same material, same environment, except the latter has such a poor group dynamic that they significantly underperform the other class. Variables here are time, teacher fatigue, blood sugar, and the students. I feel that the last factor has the greatest effect. And I totally agree with the fact that there's an abdication of responsibility from the parent/guardian(s) in that they feel the intrinsic motivation for the student ought to be provided by the state. But then we have teachers who have tenure that play videos all day. Good times.
- camccann 17y ago
  Variables here are time, teacher fatigue, blood sugar, and the students. I'd say that, at least up to some age, any problems attributable to "the students" are really the failing of the parents, though maybe that's what you were getting at. I agree that some teachers aren't really helping matters any, but without good parental influence I don't think improving teacher quality is going to accomplish all that much.
teeja 17y ago
"I don't buy the assumption that the biggest problem is teacher quality." Me either. The biggest problem is the institution (embodied to an extent by administration.) Most teachers are qualified, hard-working. They suffer under 'overhead' like most of us do. The last thing educators need is a 'solution' from the WSJ.

pragmatic 17y ago

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/ http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/ The economic system is sending a strong signal. When you can just get by in school, become a banker and still make the equivalent of an engineer, you'd be almost foolish to go with the match/science degree. Can you do that in India/China/other third world country?

pragmatic 17y ago
To clarify, I'm saying that students in a third world country have a much greater incentive to study the hard sciences. If you're brother in law can't get a job in his bank then the only way out of poverty is to study hard. Even in relatively poor areas of the country (midwest, south) you can make a very good living as a banker (loan officer, etc).

neovive 17y ago

Instead of focusing so much on standardized testing, we need to start valuing creativity, ingenuity and communication. Just because a school can increase test scores year-over-year, does not mean that the graduating students will make the country more competitive. In fact, so much emphasis on standardized testing is likely to produce less innovation as students and teachers are forced to teach within very strict models. Unfortunately, it is hard to measure creative output, but very easy to measure test scores. I recall reading a while back about the Gates Foundation funding the creation of new schools that focus on team work and creative problem solving. This seemed to be the right approach.

tokenadult 17y ago
I recall reading a while back about the Gates Foundation funding the creation of new schools that focus on team work and creative problem solving. Yes, whatever happened to that attempt?
anamax 17y ago
> Instead of focusing so much on standardized testing, we need to start valuing creativity, ingenuity and communication. Just because a school can increase test scores year-over-year, does not mean that the graduating students will make the country more competitive. The idea that "valuing creativity, ingenuity and communication" more will make the country more competitive is appealing, but how about turning it into a scientific theory. You know, testable and falsifiable. Failure to take those steps gets us useless twaddle like self-esteem programs. BTW - If you do succeed, you get to compete with the twaddle for educational resources. Sorry about that.

known 17y ago

I believe we need more schools of type http://www.olin.edu/ http://www.olin.edu/