Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html

by ilamont • 16 years ago

131 144 16 years ago

gxs• 16 years ago

I went to an inner city Los Angeles high school. You wouldn't believe some of the individuals that can pass as qualified teachers. People that they themselves were never taught correctly, and went straight into teaching after college. This of course is the double whammy - poorly academically prepared people, with little real world experience - so they fail students on both counts.

And yet...the most annoying part of this experience was the attitude of the other students. I despised my high school mostly because absolutely nobody cared. I think it's hard for people from better areas grasp this. People really do tell the teacher to fuck off. People really do just talk amongst each other, listening to music, while the teacher tries to talk over them. And because no one puts in any level of effort whatsoever, you can get an A by simply just showing up.

I don't doubt we need better teachers. I don't doubt it at all. All I'm saying is we need better teachers at the youngest grade school levels to reach children while they are still, I guess reachable. And more importantly, we need a better way of educating parents to get their kids to care.

Then, we can really start holding teachers accountable.

chipsy• 16 years ago

For the most needy inner city kids, I think boarding schools might be appropriate even at an early age. Their home environment and neighborhood is so shattered that what they need most is a stable day-to-day existence shielded from drugs, gangs, and criminal behavior. If they don't get that, by the teen years, they're stuck in feudalistic "ghetto thinking," start getting into increasingly serious trouble, and just aren't able to take school and its discipline games seriously anymore.

Of course, fixing the quality of instruction should probably come first.

gf44• 16 years ago

"Their home environment and neighborhood is so shattered that what they need most is a stable day-to-day existence shielded from drugs, gangs, and criminal behavior."

You do realize you're talking out of your ass right? 99% of inner-city youths don't do drugs, aren't in gangs, and aren't involved in criminal behavior. Nice way to stereotype them though.

Mahh• 16 years ago

The families of many of those students you refer to are just as shattered as their neighborhoods and that may be what makes it easy for them to be susceptible to influence from the neighborhoods. They wouldn't particularly care if boarding schools could help their kids or not, even if they could have access to boarding schools.

Following this thought, the importance of education(what life would be as compared to without) needs to be understood by that society, but the ones who need to listen probably wouldn't care to listen to preaching about education's merits.

dtf• 16 years ago

Teaching sounds like one of the hardest jobs in the world. You get it from the kids, from the parents, from your superiors, from the government, from the media. I think I have at least a vague feeling for that spark of humanity that drives most good teachers, but I'm just astonished that it's enough for such a rare event to keep them doing what they do day-in day-out.

mkramlich6• 16 years ago

I may not have had to deal with as bad of a school as you did, but from what I have experienced in school life in the past, I have come to the conclusion that the #1 problem is students, with #2 being parents, maybe #3 being the way the (US at least) public school system is designed, and then somewhere at #4 or below would be teachers. Not saying that every teacher is great or without flaw. Just that many are good, many are decent, and many are -- well -- mostly insignificant compared to the impact of the students themselves, their parents, the system, etc.

wheaties• 16 years ago

This is easy to say but hard to do. "Based on excellence" is the mantra I've heard from software development circles for years and yet...

1. How many of us have lost productivity because some other developer ran rough-shod through code caring not for maintainability, readability, or even extensibility? Which one was praised and which one rewarded? Doesn't apply to teachers? Ever have a dud who couldn't do simple math in charge of the algebra class? Guess what the next teacher has to deal with.

2. How do "normal" people in managerial roles judge competency between two people in such roles? When looking at our own industry we see how difficult it is for "normal" people to make those sorts of judgement calls. Some schools require only 2 years teaching experience before moving on to superintendent roles. Some states more. With such divergence what can we expect?

3. How will we measure such excellence? What metric? What new system will evolve to capitalize on this metric despite the spirit of the metric? Unintended consequences?

ig13• 16 years ago

Generally people seem to support either performance improvement measured by exams (i.e. how much students improved over the course of the term) or some sort of peer-review system.

Both have their own problems, but both seem to be much better than the arbitrary system of seniority. There is evidence to show teachers get better with experience, but almost all of that improvement happens within the first few years of a teachers career.

tptacek6• 16 years ago

It's actually not obvious that a testing-based teacher measurement regime would be better than the seniority system. The seniority system does lock in mediocre teachers, but it has minimal knock-on effects to the actual curriculum. Test-based measurement has already made some curricula toxic to students, and those test results have minimal impact to the teachers themselves.

How much worse would it be if the teach-to-the-test incentive was "afford a new car"?

alphaoverlord3• 16 years ago

This might sound trite, but I think the solution would be to couple standardized testing with performance based pay. Unlike code, it's hard to aim for solely short-term gains. As long as teachers aren't cheating, I can't imagine many ways to teach students that aren't inherently beneficial to the student. Teaching better study habits, etc might not be directly related to their material, but it still helps the students.

Also, I think there are fairly generalizable development timelines for children. While standardized testing can never be a gold standard in determining progress, I think we can both agree such testing does measure a worthwhile metric. I would definitely agree that there are edge cases, both in terms of individual students and in terms of school districts, but linking pay with progress seems on face value to be a good idea. That, plus independent school districts, is system-based evolution. Such selection depends on creating the right relationship between effort and reward.

HaloZero3• 16 years ago

The argument against standard test scores as the metric is that it covers two basic competencies, reading and mathematics. Which are of course fundamental but there are edge cases of people who have no interest in those fields but would prefer foreign languages, arts, etc. Teachers in the arts can inspire and help provide to students but don't have any standardized evaluation method.

Plus for students who are younger where one teacher teaches all subjects, the focus on mathematics/reading will increase compared to arts. The arts education significantly reduced during No Child Left Behind b/c of the requirements.

You can obviously argue that competency in basics should be achieved before arts too though. Just pointing out an issue

SkyMarshal2• 16 years ago

>I think we can both agree such testing does measure a worthwhile metric.

I don't know about that. I've come across plenty of critiques of standardized tests, especially back during the debate over Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' initiative.

That kind of 'education' may produce good little worker drones, but I'm not sure it's something we want to base the entire education system of the Republic on.

dspeyer• 16 years ago

In many cases, you will get better short-term results by drilling recipes or factoids than pursuing deep understanding, though the latter is far more valuable in the long run (and in early schooling, long is the only run that matters). There's too much trivia-memorizing in schools as it is.

WalterBright3• 16 years ago

There is no bureaucratic rule that can be devised that can separate good teachers from bad ones. Every such rule can and will be gamed. It's like the difference between art and porn - the difference is obvious by inspection, but impossible to codify.

With a free market school system, people will know who the good teachers are and will pay for them (supply and demand).

With a government school system, this simply will never work, because the people paying the salaries will never be the ones judging the teachers.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

Unless the teachers are going to be individually contracted by parents, don't private-sector schools have the same evaluation problem? They still have to separate good and bad teachers via some sort of process, probably overseen by management (aka bureaucracy). The similarity of the agency problems is one reason corporations internally often look so much like governments.

tisganitis• 16 years ago

Right, and in a free market system, those who can pay for the best teachers will get them, and those who cannot pay will be left with the worst teachers. Isn't that unfair?

That is also exactly the opposite of what Gates is trying to accomplish with his plan. He wants to incentivize teachers to work with the poorest students at the most disadvantaged schools. By definition, the free market alone CANNOT solve this problem.

baldercrash• 16 years ago

Overall I would agree that free market bureaucracies are more efficient and better run than goverernment bureaucracies.

However, the fact that a bureaucracy is not run by the government does not mean that it knows what level of contribution individual employees are making.

Calculating such contributions is infeasible for all but the smallest groups (like startups, as PG has written about).

The people who are best at selecting good teachers are pupils. If classes were optional we would quickly find out which were worth attending by watching children vote with their feet.

However, children will never be allowed to do this in schools. A school that took children seriously and respected them as humans (or even just as customers), would quickly cease to resemble anything that we would recognise as a school.

Despite all this, education is in the process of being reformed. This is possible because reform is happening outside schools, for example in the unschooling movement.

yummyfajitas14• 16 years ago

Regarding 2), you do it via Value Added Modeling. You build a statistical predictor of student performance (based on standardized test scores) then measure Performance = Avg(Actual - predicted).

tptacek6• 16 years ago

This makes sense but suggests that we need to simultaneously invest in better standardized tests. The most common standardized tests we have today make for poor year-round curricula.

jbooth3• 16 years ago

Statistical forward looking models proposed by a guy who works in finance?

How could that ever go wrong :)

EDIT: More seriously, if it's already impossible to measure, I fail to see how more complicated metrics would do anything but do an even worse job of measuring. There might be exceptions to this rule in a few cases but it's generally the way things work.

Natsu4• 16 years ago

> You build a statistical predictor of student performance (based on standardized test scores) then measure Performance = Avg(Actual - predicted).

And then you watch student performance get gamed by the teachers. There are all kinds of ways: turn a blind eye to cheating, move poor performers to others schools (including by getting them to graduate when they shouldn't), alter their tests (this is already being done under NCLB according to several news reports), ...

You're better off by having skilled teachers rate the other teachers. People aren't as easily gamed as systems of rules are.

aik5• 16 years ago

This has been proven to not work (or work very poorly). Can supply references if you'd like.

JshWright3• 16 years ago

It would suck for the folks who paid tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege to teach in states like New York where a graduate degree is mandatory for public school teachers.

It's going to take almost two decades for the master's "bonus" to cover the cost of my wife's graduate degree.

adamsmith• 16 years ago

If times were good and budgets were flush you can be sure reform proponents would suggest using the excess capital to grandfather the old systems in and support the new ones.

However, that's not the case we're in right now. That doesn't mean it won't change in the future. It's also possible (likely?) that reformers' strategy for lean times will be less successful than the strategy for times of excess. Only time will tell!

alphaoverlord3• 16 years ago

If a graduate degree is mandatory, why is there a bonus? Can't they raise the base?

danteembermage• 16 years ago

Hence the scare quotes on bonus I think

JshWright3• 16 years ago

Beats me. There is definitely a column on the pay scale for a graduate degree though.

jonknee• 16 years ago

Well if the degree was worthwhile, they will get the bonuses for doing well and still be OK. Otherwise what are we paying for?

JshWright3• 16 years ago

Bonuses for doing well? That's crazy... (and not an option under the current system)

robryan• 16 years ago

Surely there are other benefits of the masters degree over the small amount of additional annual wage?

panacea• 16 years ago

End capitalist bonuses based on currency accumulation and seniority.

ig13• 16 years ago

Malcom Gladwell wrote an article with a similar viewpoint in the New Yorker a few years ago: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_...

andrewce• 16 years ago

This response comes via the Washington Post, and offers sourced rebuttals/refinements:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers...

Also: while I've got a world of respect for Bill Gates and his philanthropic efforts, I'm not sure that he's the most qualified to discuss education reform.

I'm certainly down with schools restructuring their budgets, but there's wasted money all over the place, and even if we got rid of seniority and degrees as a means of determining salary, it's unreasonable to think that that $59 billion would be spent only on the students, or that it would be trimmed entirely.

Even if we switch to a system of merit pay, that money has to come from somewhere.

Again, loads of respect for Mr. Gates, and full agreement that budgets should be overhauled, but it's gonna take more than just cutting out seniority-based pay.

ezy• 16 years ago

Seems like the post article just wants to belabor a point Bill Gates did not actually make.

The points he did make, actually agree with the article's sources, but he does not reach the same overall conclusion. He did explicitly say that seniority matters and that the difference peters out mostly after ~5 years (he put a graph on the screen with sources). He mentioned other metrics should be applied as well, but did not specify exactly what the metrics should be (whereas this article concentrates on test scores as if he presented that as the only valid metric).

Gates minor conclusion is the reasonable one... seniority does matter, but not as much after a certain period of time, therefore it cannot be used as the only method of assessment. Furthermore, seniority is a rather indirect measure of competence. I don't see the opposing view as being arguable with a clear conscience, frankly.

And, in fact, if you listen to the speech, he does not state budgets as a priority -- yes, an obstacle to be overcome, but not the focus. The focus is in better outcomes.

zootar• 16 years ago

In addition to the difficulty of rating teachers in a way that can be fairly coupled to pay, the fraction of teachers able to substantially increase their performance might be small. Identifying specific sources of confusion, inventing ways of explaining things to alleviate confusion, etc are non-trivial challenges.

What I think might be more effective than attempting to pay teachers for their teaching performance is paying teachers to produce very high-quality teaching material that other teachers can easily use themselves: detailed lesson plans, visual aids, interesting labs, textbooks, maybe even tables of sources of confusion and how to alleviate them.

Legion2• 16 years ago

I wish there was less focus on teachers, and more focus on fixing the problem of how badly kids fall behind before they ever get to school.

The battle is IMO largely won and lost in years 0-5, before kids even reach 1st grade. That's why programs like "Baby College" in Harlem are so important.

Even when kids do reach school age, the work of teachers is either amplified or underminded by parents.

My wife teaches 2nd grade (in a poor, needy school district), and frankly, the hours a day she has them can't undo the failure of parents in the kid's early development, nor overcome the constant sabotage of parents undoing much of the day's progress.

Yes, there are bad teachers. But good teachers can badly struggle due to no fault of their own. One teacher may go from superstar metrics to really poor numbers, based on the luck of the draw.

The point is, if you really want to improve education, you have to start in the home, in early childhood.

jseliger4• 16 years ago

The battle is IMO largely won and lost in years 0-5, before kids even reach 1st grade. That's why programs like "Baby College" in Harlem are so important.

Head Start was designed precisely to solve this problem. It has existed for 40 years and hasn't solved it, for the kinds of reasons that are described here: http://epa.sagepub.com/content/17/1/62.abstract and here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=226111 . People have been trying to show that Head Start leads to longitudinal improvements for the entirety of Head Start's existence, and they've failed. I work in my family's business as a grant writing consultant, and we've had a bunch of clients running Head Start programs and Head Start clones. They don't work.

In short, you're advocating for an approach here that has already (mostly) failed. Gates is at least saying that we shouldn't keep rewarding teachers for things (seniority, degrees) that don't actually impact student achievement.

Legion2• 16 years ago

No, what I'm talking about is absolutely not Head Start.

The students of Head Start are preschool children.

The students of Baby College are parents. It's about teaching people how to be parents.

When the problem is that bad parenting sabotages structured education, the answer isn't to start the education earlier. The answer (well, at least part of it) is to improve the parents.

Bertrood• 16 years ago

Mr. Gates has identified the 50 state school superintendents as critical stakeholders in his plan. With this identified audience, he's turned what seems an impossible task into a more manageable one.

Now he has an identifiable audience, with identifiable needs. He will be able to eliminate some of the noise that surrounds such a large issue because of this.

Ultimately, the goal is to build the best possible performance based system, but Mr. Gates saves the time and effort associated with re-crafting rejected ideas, by identifying and including necessary input from his crucial stakeholders (state superintendents) on the front end.

forkandwait14• 16 years ago

My favorite recent quote:

We all know that successful teaching beyond the infant class involves (a) wide and detailed knowledge of a difficult subject, (b) an enthusiasm for the subject which communicates itself to the class, and (c) a few simple tricks of the trade, learnt by anyone from a single volume and from about three weeks of experience. The art of the Educationalizer is to expand (c) into a mass of pretentious nonsense, fogged by technical terms and psychological twaddle. To do research in Educationalization is to forget about (a) and (b) and make the mastery of (c) seem practically impossible. Those who can, do (it has been said), and those who cannot will teach teachers how to teach other teachers the art of teaching. This is the brotherhood of the Ed.D. and it forms a sort of campus with the campus; an enclave, as it were, of people committed to the study of nothing.

Peter's Predicament, Chapter 7, The Fur-Lined Mousetrap, C. Northcote Parkinson, Leviathan House Ltd, London & New York, ISBN 0 900537 05 I, no date (really!).

(If you ask me, eliminate tenure, break the teacher's unions, and fire the least performing 5% each year measured by before and after tests each year; with 5% yearly "mortality" we could use turnover to retain the good ones. And yes, eliminate pay raises based on continuing education and seniority, neither of which measure teacher effectiveness.

I think knowing how to make a teacher good is an impossible problem, but knowing whether a teacher is good or not is not very difficult, using a combination of peer and parent review plus before-and-after test scores.

But first ... break the unions and eliminate tenure and any special protection for teachers. I am totally pro-union when it comes to janitors and factory workers, but not managerial level staff; at best, it reinforces consistent mediocrity...)

jws• 16 years ago

So if a class if students decides to throw the exam they can get the teacher fired? Sort of a middle school cousin of jury nullification.

forkandwait14• 16 years ago

I think there should be some check on this, but if a class decides to throw the exam in order to screw the teacher, the teacher probably sucks.

Also, if each students score is part of their record, there is an incentive to not throw the test even if the teacher is hated.

brg6• 16 years ago

There is little possibility of an entire class jeopardizing their entire future and graduation prospects in order to make one of their educators look bad. Also, you are suggesting that such malicious act would not be detected, and there would be no safe-guards against such an act?

aik5• 16 years ago

In our current system, peer review is very difficult, and parent review is even more difficult. Parent review is difficult because a) parents don't interact with teachers much and b) any teacher flunking a parent's child will often rate the teacher poorly.

What's being talked about here isn't revolutionizing - it's altering an already very broken system.

What I can foresee happening is the stuff you talk about going forward, and missing out on the 10 other things that need to happen to make it actually successful and so being an abject failure as a result. The other things that need to happen as to make any of this successful are (and which are more important imho): work the system to get communities and parents more involved, change the grading system, change the perspective on the purpose of standardized tests, change focus of classroom subjects, teacher purpose/focus, student purpose, etc.)

gruseom4• 16 years ago

This is all just fantasy sports of course, but here's my plan.

I would require new teachers to work as apprentices for quite some time (several years) and not pay them very much during this period. After that, if they accede to full status, I would pay them a great deal more. The reasons for this structure: (1) to weed out people who aren't intrinsically motivated by working with children, i.e. the ones who probably shouldn't have permanent teaching jobs; (2) it takes years to become a master teacher and mentorship is the most valuable asset (after aptitude, perhaps) on that path. An apprenticeship system seems suitable for fostering this.

As for determining who makes it and who doesn't, I'd rely mostly on peer evaluation. Standardized tests are ok too (or could be, if we had good ones) but I'd weight them second. This problem isn't algorithmic.

forkandwait14• 16 years ago

Why don't pay them decently to start with, pay them better if they deserve it, and FIRE THEM if they don't?

gruseom4• 16 years ago

Because "deserve?" and "fire" are hard functions to write. It seems easier to allow for a natural process of attrition.

Edit: I think society should ask one to earn the privilege of being a teacher (what more important asset could we entrust someone with than children?) and to compensate those who have earned it well enough to make it well worth earning.

What's a natural way to earn the right to be a teacher? By assisting those who have already earned it.

(This does raise a bootstrapping question, but that's hardly the crux of the matter.)

jdietrich2• 16 years ago

If we really cared, we could increase the quality of teaching beyond all recognition. It wouldn't be remotely difficult.

Massively increase pay for teachers, tripling or quadrupling pay at every level. Mandate a specific postgraduate qualification and a statutory minimum of continuing professional development. Recruit only the best and the brightest, specifically seeking out graduates from the best universities. Advertise teaching as a career on prime-time television. Put Obama on The Daily Show and Oprah to talk about the importance of teaching. In short, a concerted effort to make teaching every bit as prestigious as law or medicine. After a few years, require every teacher in the country to reapply for their own job. Relative to the Military or Social Security budgets, the cost would barely even register on the balance sheet.

We could quite easily live in a world where Asian parents push their kids into teaching, where Yale and Harvard vie to be the best school of education, where teaching is seen as a first choice rather than a last resort.

We don't, because we don't really care. We pretend that education matters, but really it's one of those things that you're supposed to care about but most people don't, like the environment or human rights. We don't care whether college students learn anything, only that they get a suitably prestigious certificate. We don't care whether high school graduates can meaningfully participate in society, only that they can pass the standardised tests, whatever they might be.

It is practically self-evident that we don't care about teaching. We all know that the current system is failing, but we aren't prepared to do the obvious things that would actually rescue it. For as long as we see education in the abstract as high status but teaching in practice as low status, we are doomed to watch our school system circle the drain.

forkandwait14• 16 years ago

We don't revolutionize teaching because TENURE AND SENIORITY RULES ARE LOCKED DOWN BY THE UNIONS.

Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year.

(Edit: we really DO care about teaching, and spend enormous amounts of tax payers dollars and collective worry on it.)

Natsu4• 16 years ago

> Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year.

That only works if you're good at recognizing the bottom 10% and have tight anti-cheating controls. Otherwise, things will go straight to hell. Also, you're neglecting the fact that it'll destroy cooperation among the teachers, because it turns things into a "it's either him or me, and it's not going to be me" scenario. Neither effect is conductive to a better or more effective school environment.

While the idea of firing bad teachers has a lot of merit, handling it in such a way is a terrible idea. That's the sort of quick fix bad managers come up with and one of the ways bad managers can help destroy an entire organization.

But it's a lot easier to give out fixes like these than it is to understand problems, so such ideas are remarkably prevalent. That probably explains why the change X by Y% mentality is lampooned in so many Dilbert cartoons.

pmb• 16 years ago

The unions? That's your bad guy here? Teachers are poorly-paid and looked-down-upon in our society and you are blaming the only organization which sticks up for them? The unions suck, certainly, but firing teachers only works if there is a ready supply of quality replacements. Plus, if you remove the perk of job security, you are going to have to significantly increase teacher pay to compensate.

Even worse than this, you assume that we have a good way of measuring teacher quality. The unions are a red herring.

jdietrich2• 16 years ago

Why haven't the unions been broken? Nobody would tolerate unions that protected incompetent lawyers or doctors. Union-breaking is practically a science these days, it's neither expensive nor difficult, especially against a workforce with no ability to mount a meaningfully disruptive strike. It appears to me that there simply isn't the political will to do it. The teaching unions make more noise than parents and students, so they win. We return to my basic thesis, that we don't care as much about education as we'd like to think.

If you just fire the worst 10% every year, you just make teaching less attractive. As it stands, teaching is sufficiently low-status, poorly paid and unpleasant that the only people who go into it are a rare few who really want to teach and a majority who aren't competent enough to do anything else. You can't just fire bad teachers, you need to recruit good ones. For the moment, only a martyr or an idiot would decide to teach.

gte910h• 16 years ago

The unions would happily cancel much of the seniority rules for an over 2x raise of salary.

busyant• 16 years ago

The Unions are only part of the problem. You want to fire the shitty teachers, right? I'm all for that. Unfortunately, this is only a PARTIAL solution. You also need to be able to fire the shitty administrators (see below). AND you need to be able to "fire" the shitty students (troublemakers).

The school administrations are often composed of transient "revolving door" bureaucrats whose only goal is to pad their resumes with bullet-points of dubious changes that they implemented. * Administrators will frequently alter programs ("we do physics in 11th grade? Well we're doing it in 9th grade now!") simply to demonstrate that they've made a difference. * They will place weak students in classes where they don't belong just to maintain the appearance that they are serving a useful function ("Sure X failed biology and he'll be lucky to get into community college, but I'm recommending that he take chemistry b/c it looks good on his transcript"). * They will protect troublesome students to the detriment of other students ("You can't keep X out of class all the time. You're just going to have to learn to control him")

Students and Parents are as much of the problem as the teachers and the administration: There is often a pervasive attitude of entitlement without any effort amongst the students and their parents. Troublesome students are allowed to ruin the learning environment for everyone else. In an ideal world, you could kick those students out of class (or school), but in reality you can't (see ADMINISTRATION).

Amusing--but not uncommon--anecdote: My cousin is a high-school teacher who had a student who continuously disrupted one of her classes. She finally phoned the student's mother to tell her about her son's attitude problem. The mother responded with:

"Look...I don't call you to complain when he misbehaves at home. So, don't call me up because he's misbehaving on YOUR time."

That's not the union's fault, is it?

hdctambien4• 16 years ago

You don't really have to worry about firing the worst 10% ... how about keeping the good teachers?

http://www.ncsu.edu/mentorjunction/text_files/teacher_retent...

"In 1999, for example, our schools hired 232,000 teachers who had not been teaching the year before (i.e., new teachers hired who were not simply moving from one school to another). But the schools lost more than 287,000 teachers who left for other occupations that year—55,000 more than they hired"

If we have/discover the ability to tell the good teachers from the bad, then we should just start hiring only the good teachers. Eventually the good will out number the bad and maybe even teach the bad teachers a thing or two)

Maybe instead of firing the bottom 10%, we should "improve" them. It's either that or replace them. Of course, you could very well be replacing them with someone just as bad or worse.

yummyfajitas14• 16 years ago

Relative to the Military or Social Security budgets, the cost would barely even register on the balance sheet.

WTF? We already spent more on education than the military ($859B > $731B, circa 2008, 2009 numbers not available yet). If we tripled spending, education would be bigger than SS, military, medicare and medicaid combined. Unless you are Paul Krugman, I think that level of spending would register on the balance sheet.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/

Further, teachers are already paid roughly as well as engineers (per month worked, not per calendar year). See this thread for details:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1673075

Further, do you have evidence that our "best and brightest" would provide significantly better education than the people we get now? Going by pay/education level, I probably qualify as best and brightest. But I wasn't a great teacher at all.

tzs2• 16 years ago

I once made $7000 for 30 minutes work. By your argument, I'm paid roughly as well as a top athlete (per minute worked, not per calendar year).

The problem, of course, is that was a one-time opportunity. I can't get 30-minute intervals at will that pay anything remotely like that.

mkramlich6• 16 years ago

> Further, teachers are already paid roughly as well as engineers (per month worked, not per calendar year). See this thread for details:

For certain rather extreme and wide definitions of "roughly". :) Part-time Kindergarten teachers != community college professors != Harvard professors. Pretty wide range of pay there. Whereas engineers always pay pretty damn good, and don't have to babysit children.

apu• 16 years ago

I dunno how they were calculated, but the education vs. military spending numbers you quote are really out of whack.

For education vs. military (dod + homeland security), I see the following from different sources:

  [1] reports 45.4 billion vs. 660.6 billion
  [2] reports ~100 billion vs. ~700 billion
  [3] reports 157 billion vs. 895 billion
  [4] reports 89.4 billion vs. 544.5 billion

Your source is clearly an outlier.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budg...

[2] http://www.federalbudget.com/

[3] http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/budget_pie_gs.php?span=u...

[4] http://www.usaspending.gov/explore?carryfilters=on

ohyes• 16 years ago

WTF? You are extremely recklessly wrong and should be ashamed of it...

We actually spend about 70 billion on education. If you look at this department of education's website, you can find a .pdf or excel sheet of the actual budget. It is here:

http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/history/index.html

If you look at the department of defense's website here: http://comptroller.defense.gov/budget.html

You will notice that its budget is around 700 billion. (Meaning we could multiply the DoE's budget by 10 and be about equal). That is just DoD, and does not include departments like homeland security or the FBI.

I will probably get down-voted for this comment, but seriously, check your fucking sources, check their biases, and go to any primary sources available. Don't just click the first link out of Google machine.

This is a clear failing of the education system, as you should have been taught this before exiting high school!

Government expenditures are quite obviously freely available...

There is no need to go to a '.com' website for them. If you actually see who is behind the site: 'http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/.

The proprietor of your cited source (Christopher Chantrill), has a notable political bias.

http://www.christopherchantrill.com/

Going by your research ability, I'd say you aren't the best and aren't that bright.

brg6• 16 years ago

The current pay for teaching is already astronomical, although admittedly entry level pay is poor and benefits only come with some seniority.

To enumerate what needs to be considered in pay, 1. 100% health care coverage for individuals and families. 2. Vacation on top of all major holidays off. 3. Teachers have student loan forgiveness of 100% after 5 years of seniority. 4. They need not pay social security instead leverage a percentage into private fund. 5. By the rule of 90 can retire at 56 with 80% pay for the rest of their lives, not just to social security age. 6. Health care benefits are extended through retirement on top of medicare. 7. Annual pay raise regardless of individual or district wide performance 8. Immediate pay increases for graduate study or other "improvement" 9. Employment that is not geographically limited 10. 8 months of work, during which attendance is only required 5 days a week from 7-4.

dewittm2• 16 years ago

My mother's a public school teacher in Indiana and only some of these benefits are familiar sounding to me. Perhaps I just haven't been paying attention. Do you have any sources for these claims?

duffbeer703• 16 years ago

Yeah, sure. New York spends a ridiculous amount on education and is bottom of the pack in performance. My sister makes $85k as a teacher, and will retire making $105k on the current scale, with a pension of $65k after that.

arethuza• 16 years ago

You might be interested in this UK charity that was covered on BBC Radio 4 last week:

http://www.teachfirst.org.uk/TFHome/index.aspx

They take high flying graduates from top Universities and "fast tracks" them into teaching jobs in "challenging" schools. The idea being that the graduates teach for at least two years and then go on to other things with the support of the charity.

I guess just exposing young kids to people who have the drive to succeed at a top university gives them a completely different perspective on what is possible.

lancewiggs• 16 years ago

Modelled on the excellent Teach For America program no doubt.

forkandwait14• 16 years ago

Google "waiting for superman".

aik5• 16 years ago

and then read the criticism of the movie and ponder it for a while to get a more balanced perspective.

dpatru• 16 years ago

Our "education" model is fundamentally broken. It's based on the idea that we need to warehouse kids in institutions modeled on 18th century factories so that they can do well on "standardized" tests. Certainly Bill Gates did not obtain his education this way. He basically educated himself by following his passion from an early age. He working in his field of choice at the age of 15. By 20 he had founded Microsoft.

"School" for Bill Gates was his educated home environment, the block of computer time he could use in 8th grade, the Computer Center Corporation where he worked while in high school, and his projects with Paul Allen as a teenager. It was the unstructured resources that were around him.

Not every kid is a Bill Gates. Most probably need less formal instruction because they do not need as much abstract knowledge.

Schools as they exist today should be abolished and the teachers and other staff that work in them should be taken off the public payrolls and allowed to take useful jobs in the private sector.

Schools, to the extent that they exist at all, should be more like graduate study where an advisor suggests resources for further study. These advisors could be unpaid volunteers. People with successful careers in areas of that the student is interested in who interact with the student intermittently perhaps over the internet.

The bulk of kids' time should be spent in projects or actual work, apprentice-style, in an area of their interest. Instead of being grouped together in dysfunctional groups of their own kind, young people should be distributed in the economy, working with and under the supervision of competent adults in the various fields.

jseliger4• 16 years ago

Schools as they exist today should be abolished and the teachers and other staff that work in them should be taken off the public payrolls and allowed to take useful jobs in the private sector.

Have you worked as a teacher or in front of a classroom? I ask because I might've been sympathetic to these kinds of views before I started grad school at the University of Arizona. Most students in grades K - 16 are not going to do intensive projects or actual work; many of them simply aren't ready to do so. Most students in most subjects are there because they need the spur and structure school provides.

This is true even at very high levels; how many people would actually write a dissertation if not for the fact that they'd already spent several years in grad school, that their professional lives depend on it, and they'll look like a fool if they don't? Hell, even with those constraints, there are a shockingly high number of ABDs floating around out there.

Schools, to the extent that they exist at all, should be more like graduate study where an advisor suggests resources for further study. These advisors could be unpaid volunteers.

This is insane. It does not scale. If volunteers did a better job of educating than the system we have now, no one would send their kids to mediocre public schools.

All of your ideas are wildly utopian, and I don't mean that in a good way. There is no practical way to implement them.

mkramlich6• 16 years ago

and while we're at it, let's put a cap on CEO compensation at $300k/year for all non-founding CEO's and non-founding executives.

lists4• 16 years ago

I personally think Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics should somehow be incorporated into whatever educational reforms as a platform/canonical text. It's not just so much an ethical treatise (since he doesn't it tell you what to do) as a brochure on parenting.

panthera• 16 years ago

WalterBright is right.

How about eliminating taxpayer funding for schools altogether? We spend $68B on the DoE.

That is ~$900 per child in the US, according to http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp.

Then, entrepreneurs will be motivated to build schools because they can earn a profit based on enrollment. As with all private enterprises, they will be forced to compete on quality of service.

These schools will also be judged on the performance and caliber of their eventual alumni classes.

I am willing to wager that at least 30% of this board went to a private college. Why do we need the government running our schools, as well? To standardize a curriculum?

Electronics companies use the Underwriters's Lab to certify their products. I'm sure schools can have something similar.

Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

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