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Unread 22-09-2009, 20:04
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dtengineering dtengineering is offline
Teaching Teachers to Teach Tech
AKA: Jason Brett
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Re: FIRST and Obama's Innovation Strategy

Quote:
Originally Posted by oddjob View Post
That’s probably where the best bang for the buck is e.g. linking teacher merit pay to student performance. In that regard, spending the $5B on teacher stipends for supporting robotics teams or other activities is probably going to have a very positive affect. But I’m glad I don’t have the power to spend $5B of other peoples money as I please, that’s outright crazy.
Wikipedia has a reasonable article on teacher merit pay at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_pay. Without getting in to the argument here, I would just suggest that like most stories, there are two sides to this one.

I will also suggest that $5 billion might not be such a crazy amount of money to spread across the United States. There are roughly 50 million K-12 students in the USA, so that is only about $100 per student. Even the larger figure of $100 billion for education... which really is a staggering number... is not so large when the overall size of the education system is considered, especially if it is spread across several years.

I hope the money is spent wisely. I might be biased, but I do consider education to be more of an investment than an expenditure.

Jason
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