I wanted to come back to this too; I think it applies to the math education thread, but I’m not clear how to say it. So I’ll make something up.

(1) our schools operate on a “factory” or “industrial engineering” model, in which students are the workpieces and “success” is modeled not by how effective the individual outcomes are, but rather by how effectively the factory produces a steady flow of barely acceptable work products. This means, with self-adapting “workpieces”, that some of us manage, in some of the areas of our interests, to “pull ourselves ahead” in the production line.

I think this model is massively flawed, and — now that I put it that way — I think needs massive revision.

Okay, so here’s what I was trying to say.

First, we don’t define “success” in the schools in a useful way. We start kids nominally on 1 September, in kindergarten; we expect they will go from workstation to workstation — that is, from grade to grade — on 1 September every year until they’ve been through 13 workstations and graduate. We haver an idea of what they ought to be getting from each year, but the definition of “success” isn’t so much that the kid is actually succeeding at that topic, as it is that the kid hasn’t “failed”.

In industry, in a “six sigma” or TQM environment, what that means is that we’re setting the tolerance to be very wide; we care more about how long the process takes than what the quality of the output is. In fact, we have a grading scheme that makes A,B,C,D all “passing” grades; we don’t ask for mastery of the topic before we kick kids on down the production line.

Second, the reward structure is all screwed up. (Yes, that’s the technical term.) The rewards to the workers (teachers) aren’t coupled to the quality of the outputs. In fact, if you want to get reqarded in the school systems, you need an M Ed or an MSW, and to become a councellor or a principal, or otherwise move up in administration.

Again, we’d expect from this to see all the best people moving away from teaching, and towards administration. The ones who remain as long-time teachers are either incompetent, or saints.

It’s frankly amazing how many saints there are, but there are a lot of the other ones, too.

Third — this is a bugaboo for WB, and rightly so — the people doing “education” as an academic topic get rewarded not for improvements in their outcomes, but for all the new papers and innovative ideas they can publish. To publish an “innovative” idea it has to be different, and you have to get it adopted.

Notice anything missing there?

Now, if I were the usual politician, I’d stop there. It’s a problem, something Ought To be done, that’s enough.

But I’m not, thank god.

Okay, what’s wrong and what can be done.

(1) For crying out loud, decide that the basics — like “write a literate sentence in which subject and verb agree in number”, “read a liteate blog”, long division — are, and start to measure the ability of people in school against those basics.

Don’t tell me you’re having a certain number of failures. That’s not acceptable. If it takes three years to teach first grade, it does.

(2) Teachers that do those things really well get paid more. Really *really* well, paid LOTS more.

I know I’ve ranted about the one-room school before, but it’s worth summarizing — I looked at the one-room school at the Adams County Museum. 25 seats, about 400 square feet, desks one each, a blackboard.

You ever look at what they were expected to learn? Not just reading, writing, and ciphering — no, they had to learn history, they memorized poetry, they could do things like work out an amortization schedule for a mortgage by hand.

(Why did it work better? My guess is that since the older kids were supposed to help the younger kids, and/or work on their own while the teacher worked with others, there was a lot of tutoring going on. Tutoring is a helluva way to learn a topic.)

If you paid $9000 per student per year — along the lines of what NYC pays — that’s $225K.

Pay $50 a square foot for the classroom rent per year (util. incl.), that’s $20K. Spend another $1K per student per year for materials, and that leaves $180K per year for the teacher.

Want to be that if we said “you can make $180K but your kids have to all graduate able to read, write, and do arithmetic” we might get a better quality of teacher?