[Nemo]

Originally Posted by Ether

How should society solve this problem? Do you have some good ideas?

I'll take a crack at this. In no particular order:

1. Wide availability of birth control. This includes subsidizing it for the poor and teaching students about birth control in sex education. It’s much easier to be a good parent if you don’t have kids until you have your life setup well enough to do a good job of it. Barriers to acquiring and using birth control cause people to have kids when they aren’t prepared. No amount of blaming those parents for making bad decisions is going to change the fact that these kids exist, and many of those kids would have been better off if they had been born to older parents with a more secure life situation. Assuming that this is true for even a small percentage of those kids, the return on investment for birth control is enormous. The difference between a kid who shows up to school with a “bad” upbringing (possibly ending up on welfare or in prison) and a kid who shows up to school eager to learn is huge.

2. Wide availability of preschool. Achievement gaps exist on the first day of kindergarten, and they only get bigger as years pass. Preschool offers the best bang for your buck if you’re a government trying to improve educational achievement.

3. Reduce poverty. You can’t properly fix education without addressing poverty. And we could, if we cared to. This is not the same thing as growing the economy. Address urban decay. Find ways to cause people with practically no skills to become productive. It is a very difficult problem, but poverty is the cause of so many other problems that it’s senseless to ignore it. Has anybody talked about reducing poverty at all in an election in the past two decades? Related to reducing poverty: make health care and food assistance available to all kids that need it (programs exist - make sure they work properly). Call me draconian, but I think a rational society with finite resources provides health care to kids first and the elderly second.

4. Wide availability of programs that get kids excited about STEM, including FIRST.

5. Create better curriculum, including rethinking the subjects we teach in school. The stuff we’re using is antiquated in many ways, and smart people have written many words about what’s wrong with it and proposed ways to make it better. As a country, we’ve spent many dollars and much time writing tests, analyzing test data, writing standards, commissioning reports, etc. Instead of describing generalities of good curriculum (yes, it’s only one aspect of good education), let’s actually create it. Throw some serious resources toward making an outstanding national curriculum for every subject. Make the curriculum free to any school that wants to try it. Make it a resource for teachers and let them use whichever parts they deem appropriate to go along with whatever else they’re using. Don’t make it a required checklist or a script.

5b. Once we have a national curriculum, put it out on “education.gov” or something and use that site to connect teachers and foster collaboration between teachers everywhere. Create good message boards; create a setting where teachers post more curriculum pieces, but somehow moderate/vet the lessons so the site doesn’t turn into a hodge-podge of junk like some of the existing sites that I’ve visited – have a style guide, have editorial guidelines, whatever. Right now there are a bunch of sites that haven’t really taken off, but an online national curriculum could become an instant hub for a great online teaching community. There are so many teachers that we really ought to have a great online collaboration place in the same way that FRC has chiefdelphi.com.

6. Change school funding to make it more equitable. Schools in better areas are funded better, which makes it easier for them to hire good teachers, build nice facilities, get decent materials, etc. Schools gets around half of their funding from property taxes, leading to big inequities. I’d like to see state and federal taxes increased and local property taxes decreased by offsetting amounts (would be extremely difficult to achieve in real life) and see school funding distributed centrally in some way that is more fair. Equal amounts per student isn’t necessarily fair, but I think some sort of formula could be more fair than what we currently have. This isn’t going to happen any time soon, because the better funded schools/communities would stand to lose a portion of their funding to fund the schools that are currently underfunded. It needs to happen, though. Right now, poor people live in poor neighborhoods with schools that get less funding when they actually need more funding to service their more challenging student populations. That is not a formula for creating a society in which everybody has a fair shot at life, regardless of where or to whom they were born.

7. Pay teachers according to the difficulty of the population they serve. As teachers move through their careers, they typically migrate to schools with better funding (including better teacher pay) and easier, more motivated student populations. And within schools, they move from teaching lower achieving students in lower level courses to teaching higher achieving students in higher level courses. Result: on average, the lowest achieving students get the least skilled, least experienced teachers - and in the schools with the least funding, to boot. We need to reverse that situation. Some poor areas actually do have well paid teachers, and I think Chicago Public Schools is an example. Where I’m at, though (Iowa), the smaller communities have less funding, and they can have problems attracting and retaining, for example, good science teachers because of lower salaries and more challenging teaching conditions.

8. Pay teachers according to performance and dismiss poor performers. Unions: go to bat for the good teachers and don’t spend your resources defending lousy teachers (FYI, I am a union member). Use testing as one component of evaluations, but also use performance reviews and classroom visits and other sensible pieces of evidence. In the evaluations, find ways to give teachers credit for doing extra stuff like teaching citizenship and character, communicating well with parents, motivating kids to get involve in extra activities, and causing kids to be more curious and inspired in addition to scoring in a certain way on tests. Otherwise test results dominate, and it causes teachers to crowd out other important educational goals in favor of achieving narrower content goals. When using test results: use the right sorts of tests (some of the newer tests are getting good at measuring high level thinking skills – tests like that can be a useful tool); average scores over a sufficiently long period to make it fair (students vary a lot from class to class, and their performance on a single test can vary randomly from the kid’s true ability depending on what sort of day they’re having); set a fair bar according to the type of students a teacher is working with; give teachers detailed reports to indicate not just the scores, but which specific sub-areas their students are strong or weak in so they will actually know what they need to change to improve their students’ performance. I would be okay with additional scrutiny and evaluation (I don’t think I will get fired) – I should point out, however, that I will hate it if a new evaluation system causes me to do tons and tons and tons of paperwork and meetings, because that subtracts from the time I use to do stuff that actually helps me improve my teaching.

9. Attract more top-notch people into the teaching profession. Maybe this means paying teachers in some content areas more than others, based on supply and demand (this idea is incredibly unpopular among certain groups, as you might imagine). Maybe it means paying off college loans for people who switch careers into high need areas (programs like this exist – expand them). Pay is an issue, too. The pay isn’t completely dismal – factor in pension / vacations / yearly raises and many teachers are compensated well. The problem is that we’d rather have our best people teaching. Those top people are going to look at the pay for different career choices, and the pay differences will cause many of our best and brightest to go into sectors of the economy where there’s way more money to be made if you’re really good, especially banking, real estate, and law. Each time you increase teacher pay, you’re going to attract a few more of the best people – and if you’re producing enough teachers, when you add a few great teaching candidates to the pool, you’re going to bump a few of the very worst candidates out of consideration for teaching jobs.
[Some people think teacher pay doesn’t need to be high, because the people who truly want to do it will do it no matter what - it’s not about the money. First, they're correct about some of the potentially great teachers – but only some. If you apply this logic to other professions, you must conclude that any truly important job should have lower pay than its required qualifications would otherwise seem to call for – a dubious conclusion, no? Also, remember that most people have families, and providing for one’s kids can and does come out ahead of doing a noble career for a great many of the really talented people in this world.]