“not easy to get better results simply by spending money” is not in conflict with “getting better results needs more funding than taxpayers are prepared to hand out”.
It could be the results are nonlinear, and the real gains happen a long way past the current funding levels. It could be there are many required improvements, and money is just one constraint, but visible enough that it makes the others un-testable.
As the Gates Foundation research suggests currently a bachelor of education doesn’t teach anything that helps teachers to help their students get better education results. You could save a lot of money by simply not paying people with a bachelor of education more money.
ChristianKI. That I think is a USA problem, but many teachers here (NZ) have rated teaching college as pretty much waste of time, with all their real learning coming from ground-zero experience under good mentors. As I perceive it, the problem with teaching college is that they are closely aligned with the university system and lecturers want to teach their research interests, not necessarily “strategies for effective engagement of ADHD and ASD students in your classroom”. My daughter-in-law went through experimental system where she was put into classroom of low-decile school as paid teacher after only a few weeks of intensive training, albeit with far reduced hours and a mentor. A few week-long intensive training camps during the year. Something of “crucible experience” with I gather a substantial dropout rate and a longer route to full teacher registration, but arguably a better training than college. Long term analysis of the programme will be interesting.
Unfortunately, problems of US academia are not limited to the US. The problem isn’t just that professors focus on their research interests. If there research would be about useful things like “strategies for effective engagement of ADHD and ASD students in your classroom” there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s rather that they focus on critical theory instead of focusing on actually effective studies.
Instead of asking how a teacher can effectively project his authority in a classroom so that the children follow his teachings, they rather want to deconstruct authority. This is in turn is different from changing the school system to something like what happens in Sudbury Valley, so it ends up as a quite useless activity.
Changing this is not a question of money but of political will to change structures.
I do expect that projects like the one you describe are an improvement.
Hmm, I had to look up what “critical theory” is, but I do remember complaints like in early 80s about one college in particular. A friend of sister went through it and called it the “Society for the Protection of the Unborn Thought” (Society for Protection for Unborn Child was a prominant anti-abortion organisation here). Needless to say, it didnt make an impression on her, and think that particular problem vanished in reforms of the 90s.
My daughter went through the conventional college route to teaching but the complaint were more lecturers hobby horses on continuous teaching practise evaluation, learning styles etc. - ie theoretically useful but not the most important things for beginner teachers. Lots of what an ideal learner and classroom should be like but not a lot on how to get there.
Indeed. Perhaps focusing on MORE teachers (aka smaller class sizes) is more important than BETTER teachers (though I suspect both matter). And certainly more important than MORE CREDENTIALED teachers.
Note that it may well be that this should to be framed as “don’t pay teachers less because they didn’t get an Education degree” rather than “don’t pay them more if they did”. And it does open the can of worms of productivity measurement. Teaching is no different from many vocations in that it’s nigh-impossible to be objective and mechanical about who’s doing it well and who isn’t. It IS different from many vocations in that it’s government-administered and has a very strong union which prevents less-legible but more-useful measurement.
What percent of the population should be teachers?
While I agree that small classes are generally better, there are simply too many students, so if we make small classrooms, too many teachers will be needed. Everything has a cost, and at some moment we have to say something like “no, we can’t have 20% of adult population working as teachers; and we definitely can’t have the smartest 20% of adult population working as teachers, because smart people are needed in other professions, too—or would you perhaps prefer to have a stupid surgeon operate on you?”.
Education does not scale well, at least the way we do it now. Small classes just make it worse. What are the possibilities?
better use of books, movies, computers. A teacher standing in front of the blackboard explaining stuff, could be replaced by a book or a movie telling the same thing. (But what if you have a question? Okay, so replace half lessons with books and movies, and the questions can be asked during the remaining half.)
some kind of pyramid education, where older kids would teach younger kids? Again, let older kids teach younger kids half of the lessons, the remaining half would be with the adult teacher.
maybe just… teach less? If kids don’t pay attention, maybe just let them go (to a room where babysitting is provided without education).
And definitely decouple teaching from certification. You should not get diploma for “being there”, but for having the knowledge (regardless of whether you obtained it at school, at home, or anywhere else).
In my vision, a school would be a huge babysitting center, where parents can leave their kids between 6:00 and 18:00, with voluntary classes—some of them taught by teachers, other by students, or external people. Places for silent study, reading books. Computers with educational software and automated tests. Students can take an exam on any subject they want, at any moment. You get a diploma for completing a certain set of exams. You could spend N years at the school without getting the diploma. Or you could learn at home, and then just come to school to take the exams and get the diploma.
What percent of the population should be teachers?
In some sense, 100% - it takes a village and all that. More reasonably, maybe 5% or so to have pre-college teaching as their primary occupation. 22% of the US population in 2020 was under age 18, so this would give a comfortable class size of 5-15 (varying by subject), with some slack for admin and supervision.
You’re right, of course, that scale is the big problem—most people don’t WANT to spend the resources (money and human productivity) that is implied by universal good schooling. But they don’t want to admit that either, so they just complain. There are correlates here to cost disease in health care—the appearance of helping being more important than actually helping, and the political infeasibility of providing less service to the less-able-to-pay.
I have this vision in my head of teaching being primarily the responsibility of retired folks.
In that society, “retirement” (and perhaps more importantly retirement benefits like Social Security, Medicare, etc.) involves spending a few hours to a day (or more, if you want) at a local school, teaching.
This:
Keeps the older generation more involved, while giving them a platform to share their knowledge/experience with the young (which is arguably the a large fraction of the value of keeping them around to begin with)
Gives students (K-12 mostly, but no reason it couldn’t include college) the chance to interact and learn from people who’ve had lives and careers already, exposing them to more options, opportunities, and cultures
Helps pay for retirement benefits by having retired folks work in the public sector (perhaps with a small additional stipend for doing so?) And we’re also only talking about ~1 class a week, unless they wanted to do more
I do quite like most parts of your vision, though it would likely need to be supplemented with a set of specialists for learning disabilities or counseling, and so on.
I like this. Mostly because my idea of perfect education is “everyone uses something like Khan Academy”, where the usual response is: “but what about the small kids who can’t read yet?” Your proposal addresses this part.
“not easy to get better results simply by spending money” is not in conflict with “getting better results needs more funding than taxpayers are prepared to hand out”.
It could be the results are nonlinear, and the real gains happen a long way past the current funding levels. It could be there are many required improvements, and money is just one constraint, but visible enough that it makes the others un-testable.
As the Gates Foundation research suggests currently a bachelor of education doesn’t teach anything that helps teachers to help their students get better education results. You could save a lot of money by simply not paying people with a bachelor of education more money.
ChristianKI. That I think is a USA problem, but many teachers here (NZ) have rated teaching college as pretty much waste of time, with all their real learning coming from ground-zero experience under good mentors. As I perceive it, the problem with teaching college is that they are closely aligned with the university system and lecturers want to teach their research interests, not necessarily “strategies for effective engagement of ADHD and ASD students in your classroom”. My daughter-in-law went through experimental system where she was put into classroom of low-decile school as paid teacher after only a few weeks of intensive training, albeit with far reduced hours and a mentor. A few week-long intensive training camps during the year. Something of “crucible experience” with I gather a substantial dropout rate and a longer route to full teacher registration, but arguably a better training than college. Long term analysis of the programme will be interesting.
Unfortunately, problems of US academia are not limited to the US. The problem isn’t just that professors focus on their research interests. If there research would be about useful things like “strategies for effective engagement of ADHD and ASD students in your classroom” there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s rather that they focus on critical theory instead of focusing on actually effective studies.
Instead of asking how a teacher can effectively project his authority in a classroom so that the children follow his teachings, they rather want to deconstruct authority. This is in turn is different from changing the school system to something like what happens in Sudbury Valley, so it ends up as a quite useless activity.
Changing this is not a question of money but of political will to change structures.
I do expect that projects like the one you describe are an improvement.
Hmm, I had to look up what “critical theory” is, but I do remember complaints like in early 80s about one college in particular. A friend of sister went through it and called it the “Society for the Protection of the Unborn Thought” (Society for Protection for Unborn Child was a prominant anti-abortion organisation here). Needless to say, it didnt make an impression on her, and think that particular problem vanished in reforms of the 90s.
My daughter went through the conventional college route to teaching but the complaint were more lecturers hobby horses on continuous teaching practise evaluation, learning styles etc. - ie theoretically useful but not the most important things for beginner teachers. Lots of what an ideal learner and classroom should be like but not a lot on how to get there.
Indeed. Perhaps focusing on MORE teachers (aka smaller class sizes) is more important than BETTER teachers (though I suspect both matter). And certainly more important than MORE CREDENTIALED teachers.
Note that it may well be that this should to be framed as “don’t pay teachers less because they didn’t get an Education degree” rather than “don’t pay them more if they did”. And it does open the can of worms of productivity measurement. Teaching is no different from many vocations in that it’s nigh-impossible to be objective and mechanical about who’s doing it well and who isn’t. It IS different from many vocations in that it’s government-administered and has a very strong union which prevents less-legible but more-useful measurement.
What percent of the population should be teachers?
While I agree that small classes are generally better, there are simply too many students, so if we make small classrooms, too many teachers will be needed. Everything has a cost, and at some moment we have to say something like “no, we can’t have 20% of adult population working as teachers; and we definitely can’t have the smartest 20% of adult population working as teachers, because smart people are needed in other professions, too—or would you perhaps prefer to have a stupid surgeon operate on you?”.
Education does not scale well, at least the way we do it now. Small classes just make it worse. What are the possibilities?
better use of books, movies, computers. A teacher standing in front of the blackboard explaining stuff, could be replaced by a book or a movie telling the same thing. (But what if you have a question? Okay, so replace half lessons with books and movies, and the questions can be asked during the remaining half.)
some kind of pyramid education, where older kids would teach younger kids? Again, let older kids teach younger kids half of the lessons, the remaining half would be with the adult teacher.
maybe just… teach less? If kids don’t pay attention, maybe just let them go (to a room where babysitting is provided without education).
And definitely decouple teaching from certification. You should not get diploma for “being there”, but for having the knowledge (regardless of whether you obtained it at school, at home, or anywhere else).
In my vision, a school would be a huge babysitting center, where parents can leave their kids between 6:00 and 18:00, with voluntary classes—some of them taught by teachers, other by students, or external people. Places for silent study, reading books. Computers with educational software and automated tests. Students can take an exam on any subject they want, at any moment. You get a diploma for completing a certain set of exams. You could spend N years at the school without getting the diploma. Or you could learn at home, and then just come to school to take the exams and get the diploma.
In some sense, 100% - it takes a village and all that. More reasonably, maybe 5% or so to have pre-college teaching as their primary occupation. 22% of the US population in 2020 was under age 18, so this would give a comfortable class size of 5-15 (varying by subject), with some slack for admin and supervision.
You’re right, of course, that scale is the big problem—most people don’t WANT to spend the resources (money and human productivity) that is implied by universal good schooling. But they don’t want to admit that either, so they just complain. There are correlates here to cost disease in health care—the appearance of helping being more important than actually helping, and the political infeasibility of providing less service to the less-able-to-pay.
I have this vision in my head of teaching being primarily the responsibility of retired folks.
In that society, “retirement” (and perhaps more importantly retirement benefits like Social Security, Medicare, etc.) involves spending a few hours to a day (or more, if you want) at a local school, teaching.
This:
Keeps the older generation more involved, while giving them a platform to share their knowledge/experience with the young (which is arguably the a large fraction of the value of keeping them around to begin with)
Gives students (K-12 mostly, but no reason it couldn’t include college) the chance to interact and learn from people who’ve had lives and careers already, exposing them to more options, opportunities, and cultures
Helps pay for retirement benefits by having retired folks work in the public sector (perhaps with a small additional stipend for doing so?) And we’re also only talking about ~1 class a week, unless they wanted to do more
I do quite like most parts of your vision, though it would likely need to be supplemented with a set of specialists for learning disabilities or counseling, and so on.
I like this. Mostly because my idea of perfect education is “everyone uses something like Khan Academy”, where the usual response is: “but what about the small kids who can’t read yet?” Your proposal addresses this part.
Do you have a link to the research about the effect of a bachelor of education?