Reply #66: Money is definitely a problem. [View All]

However, even adjusted to cost of living, we still outspend the world in education. There actually is a significant amount of waste in the education system, mostly because we have such a decentralized system that we often have to duplicate efforts in nearly every imaginable category (data systems, professional development, administration, etc.) All of that said, we do need to both reduce duplicative spending AND significantly finance the system.

We also have to realize that there's a reason why companies like GM and US Steel went out of business, and it's the pensions. We should absolutely honor every teacher's pension, but that doesn't mean we should continue offering it. Long term, it's not a viable financial situation - as it currently stands, 40 cents on every additional education dollar spent by the government goes to teachers that aren't in the classroom anymore. Honestly, it's not a great deal for teachers themselves either - it locks them into careers (which this generation of Americans doesn't like at all - most switch careers 3 times in their lives) if they want to ever see their actual earnings, which they don't realize until they're in their late 40s in most cases. Plus, you can't buy a home with pension money you don't get until you retire. If you look on a dollar for dollar, total compensation package, teachers actually do make a very good living, except that most of it is deferred. I say stop deferring it - the average teacher makes about $45k/year now - bump it up to $80k and axe the pensions. The overlap would mean a short-term investment to switch systems, but in the long run, it will save our municipalities and states a lot of money and will make teaching a much more attractive profession for top college graduates.

On another note, I definitely like the idea of new teachers starting at an assistant teacher level, especially under the system I propose (which yes, is sort of like the professor/TA system, although I imagine the TAs being a little more involved in the classrooms than what happens in colleges). I would also add that teachers with unsatisfactory performance should spend a year as an assistant under an excellent teacher (at the same compensation level, of course). We expect professional development to be the end-all solution to improving teacher performance, but brief glimpses into someone else's classroom or a few seminars every year really is not going to do the trick. It's not fair to teachers to expect them to get better without actually showing them what "better" really looks like.

Lastly, vis a vis classroom sizes - everything you say makes empirical sense, I absolutely agree, but the results haven't really born out that conclusion. Believe it or not, we actually have reduced student-teacher ratios by about 5 kids since the 70's, and yet our achievement levels have been essentially flat since then. The problem is, as further studies have shown, you'd need to reduce classroom sizes by a lot - like 10 or more kids - to achieve actually giving more individual attention to a student. That also makes sense if you think about it - there's a critical mass where once you go over a certain number, any teacher would have to stop treating the class as a set of individuals and start treating it like a group.

Think about it like this - let's say you have a dinner party. If you invite 6 of your friends to show up, you can sit around the same table, everyone can be in on the same discussion, and you never really feel like you have to stop and make sure any particular people are having a good time. You are essentially giving everyone your undivided attention at the same time. But if you invited 12, chances are good that you can't sit around the same table or you have such a big table that you would never be able to talk to the person sitting way over on the other side of it. It's much more difficult to include everyone in on the same conversation, and you wind up having to divert your attention to other people. Once you cross that threshold where you can't reasonably expect to give everyone your full attention at the same time, the dynamic becomes appreciably different and stays that way to a minorly varying extent whether you have 12 or 30 people at the party.

I don't know if that metaphor makes any sense at all, but it's the same dynamic that occurs in classrooms.