What's wrong with public education, how do we fix it, and how do we pay for it?

Great Debates
41

Whack-A-Mole, your information was really helpful.

I don’t think that anyone is advocating that teachers be paid whatever they demand and that we should just fork it over because we don’t understand their jobs.

The discussion of hours came up because someone was suggesting that teachers really don’t work very much for the pay they do get.

The discussion of pay came up because many people feel that if you want to attract the very best people to the field that you consider important, you pay more. Not merely “better than average” but a nice, juicy, attractive salary. Teachers’ pay has traditionally been low because it could be - due to the availability of women who who had limited options professionally.

Teaching pay looks pretty good when compared against all full-time jobs, to be sure, but if you put it up against other professions that require 4.5 years of college, certification, and continuing education, I don’t think the pay would be 34.9% higher than average.

I don’t think paying more is the only option or the best, most immediate solution to the problems that have been described. But I don’t happen to agree with people who believe that teachers have an easy job and are highly compensated for the work they do.

42

I provided this link earlier but I’ll repost it since I think it is relevant. The Truth About Teacher Salaries and Student Achievement

The quick and dirty of the linked article is that higher pay has relatively little to no bearing on student performance. Part of the problem stems from the contracts that the NEA/AFT has managed to foist on the school system. You can’t just raise one teacher’s salary but must raise all of them (at least within a given district). Imagine we have Teacher A and Teacher B…both fourth grade teachers who have identical time in service in the same district and have the same educational background. Assume Teacher A is as good as they come and Teacher B is as bad as they come and still kepp their job. Both teachers will receive an identical salary and a raise will raise both of their salaries.

It is this sort of nonsense that I have been railing against all along. Just as in the business world teachers should get merit based raises. If you totally rock at your job you will prosper. If you just barely get your job done you’ll be left behind. Want to pay teachers more? Fine, pay the ones who deserve it more. Pay the ones who stay after school tutoring students with no extra compensation or the ones who devise a new and clever teaching plan or whatever. The teacher who is a clock watcher and gets the hell out at 4 p.m. every day and only teaches to the standardized test can continue earning whatever base rate the union contract specifies. Done right overall spending may not change one bit or, if a school wants the best, they have to pay for the best.

There is other goofiness in teacher’s compensation contracts. My sister-in-law and her brother are just finishing getting their Masters degree. Why? Simple…they get paid more if they have one. They are 3[sup]rd[/sup] and 5[sup]th[/sup] grade teachers respectively. Will they be better teachers for having their Masters degree? Probably not noticeably. Do grade schoolers require a teacher with a Masters degree? Not to my mind. Yet the union mandated contract stipulates pay increases for having certain qualifications under your belt with no reagrd to how much that makes sense. Compare this to the business world. If I got my Masters degree my company would pat me in the back and say, “That’s great.” and that would be it. No pay raise here. Presumably I could now go get a better paying job because I have a graduate degree but likely that new job would also require greater responsibility and harder work. My sister-in-law has the exact same job and responsibilities both before and after receiving her graduate degree and while I’m happy she has more money I don’t really see the sense in that.

43

That should read ‘husband’ instead of brother.

44

That is so true.

I taught my kid brother to read at an early age. By the time he was four, he already had solid reading skills, and he quickly became the best reader in his pre-school class. He learned how fun reading can be.

Sadly, many parents don’t have the same perspective. When I tell them how my brother learned to read at such a young age, they say “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that. He’s still a kid. Kids need to enjoy their childhood.” In other words, they drew a sharp distinction between learning and fun.

No wonder our schools are so messed up.

45

You’re absolutely correct. That won’t accomplish what needs to be done. You don’t simply raise everyone’s salaries and suppose quality will just happen. But if you raise salaries for the profession and more people seek training in the field in the future, teacher education programs will become more competitive. Only the best students will get into ed programs, and programs will be more rigorous. The pool of new teachers will be a much higher quality. In addition to the great teachers like celestina who would’ve become teachers anyway, you’ll have really top, dedicated people who otherwise would’ve gone into other fields. The pay issue is long-term and systemic, not something that will be fixed by giving all current teachers a raise. I don’t argue with that a bit. Generally, when I have heard the pay issue raised, I believe that the longer-term benefits were the focus, not making disgruntled current teachers a little better compensated.

There is something really wrong here. If the graduate classes your sister and BIL are taking have no impact on their teaching, then there is a serious problem with those courses. The may have the exact same job, but they will be more qualified and will do it even better. No, they are not going to be teaching 3rd graders master’s-level material, but that’s not what they are learning. They are probably learning more about pedagogy, learning theories, and child development.

Furthermore, I am surprised that your employer would not also give you a raise if you pursued an advanced degree in your field. Presumably that advanced degree would help you do your job better and aid your employer by improving the quality of your work. I’m not alone in believing this. Many businesses, for example, actually PAY big tuition bucks so their employees can get MBAs, and those employees get larger compensation packages once the degree is completed. Nurses with Masters’ degrees get paid more than when they are RNs. And you bet your butt I will get a raise when I complete my degree, even though my job itself will not change–it’s a credential and represents an advanced skill set.

FTR, I loathe a lot of what unions do, the NEA and AFTA included, and many of the criticisms of their advocacy are valid in my mind. But that doesn’t mean that others who offer similar-sounding solutions are working from the same politicized, entrenched standpoint.

46

On preview, I second what Cranky says. But also…

I have nothing against merit based pay for teachers in principle (that’s not a pun is it?). However, I would be really interested in a duscussion of what it is you think teachers should be evaluated on.
One of the measures you note (overtime) is an input based performance measure. There’s no guarantee that just because a teacher stays late, the students are any better taught (whatever that means). Furthermore, many if not most performance measures and particularly ones related to inputs (time worked, budget met, students taught, etc.) are inclined to produce perverse outcomes. Even oucome based performance measures are suceptable. People have already mentioned “teaching to the test.”
Personally, I believe that the purpose of education is to create happy adults, not necessarily smart ones, but I’m at a loss as to a realistic way to measure that.

More generally, I’d like to ask when so many people around here decided that there was a “right” level of compensation for any job. I thought that any employer paid as little as required to get an acceptable quantity and quality of employees. Isn’t that basic economics?

47

Certainly their graduate classes are relevant to teaching. A Masters degree in The History of the Reformation isn’t likely to improve a 5[sup]th[/sup] grade teacher’s pay. However, I would wager that their students will not do noticeably better by any measure (allowing for normal minor swings either way) after they start teaching with their new degrees behind them. I would consider experience much more valuable than a Masters degree for an elementary school teacher. Of course, the proof is in the pudding. Unless someone can dig up a cite showing student improvement under teachers with graduate degrees we’ll have to wait till roughly this time next year (at which point my in-laws will have had one year of teaching behind them with their Masters degree finished). Frankly I think the schools use their graduate degreed teachers more for marketing purposes than anything else as they tout that XX% of their teachers are clearly really smart and committed. Parents like to see that.

Nope…no such luck for me. I may get a big raise after having a Masters degree if my job performance improved noticeably and my employer could clearly see the extra value. Otherwise they pay $X.XX for this job and that’s about the end of it.

I guess it is fair to say that this issue changes from company to company as well as job to job. Some give outright raises. Others won’t give raises but the next step on the corporate ladder may have a graduate level degree requirement. Other businesses may not care if the recpetionist has a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology…they still get minimum wage :wink: .

Uhmmm…how about the boss deciding like most other businesses? This would be the Principal and I see no reason why he/she can’t perform that job function (perhaps in conjunction with the Assistant Principal as well).

Some sort of yardstick could also be used to aid the Principal in their decision. Student performance on standardized tests, percent improvement over the previous year or perhaps a peer grading system done by the other teachers. How all these would be weighted would have to be worked out but I’m sure over time some reasonably workable yardstick could be tweaked together. Having the Principal decide has the added advantage of getting the ‘intangibles’ measured that are too hard to measure objectively such as willingness to help out, good attitude, etc…

Additionally this allows budgets to stay in line. my last job had a maximum raise cap of 4% per employee. If a manager had 5 people under them they could give a 20% raise to one person and none to the rest or any other combination they saw fit. Teacher’s salaries could be similarly capped and the good teachers would get nice raises and the crappy ones would get none. Over time the crappy ones would probably drop out while you get to retain the better ones with bigger raises.

You might ask what happens if the Principal just doesn’t like teacher X or teacher X is blowing the Principal for a bigger raise? To that I’d say no system is perfect and it is no different than what you find in the business world. Hopefully a greivance system would exist that would allow teachers to appeal to the School Board or other body if they felt they were being treated unfairly.

48

And I thought one of the points being debated is that this is precisely one of the problems… that the quantity and quality of the teachers is not acceptable. Therefore, some are advocating higher pay.

Sorry. Nothing more to add, but I find this discussion fascinating.

49

Well, I’m not sure education is like most other businesses (but I’m trying to keep an open mind). First, if we’re talking about public education, then there’s no revenue by which to grade performance. Second, the output of a school is people and it is much more difficult to jugde the quality of people coming out of school than the quality of widgets out of the widget plant.

**
I wouldn’t be so sanguine that it will all be worked out. People have been trying to figure this out for some time and haven’t got it right yet (AFAIK). Which is why I think it’s an interesting question.

I’m sure that you can see that there are pitfalls associated with each measure you describe:
Standardized test scores —> Teaching to the test
Percent improvement —> Hard tests early, easy tests late
Peer grading —> You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours…
Of course these pitfalls obtain in many situations in life. But few are as important (IMO) or as closely scrutinized as public education, so we have to be extra careful.

Furthermore, I’d like to see some evidence (by cite or by logical analysis) that these sorts of merit raises would lead to good outcomes. This is of course a two part question: how would merit based pay help and what is it that you’re trying to achieve anyway?

Again: is the most important outcome from the public education system that it comes in under budget?

I might ask that, but I don’t. What I ask is: what are the reasonably forseeable outcomes of any merit-based pay scheme (assuming that all the actors involved will be seeking to maximize their personal gain) and what is the goal of public education anyway?

50

On second thought, while it’s a little off subject, I guess I do have one thing to add…

I’m in the Software Development industry. I’ve worked for several different companies in the course of my 25 year career. I have not yet seen a company in my field pay more for an advanced degree. On the contrary, I have seen candidates with advanced degrees actually be tossed out of consideration because often their expectation was for a higher salary and the company wasn’t willing to pay extra. I am currently the Chief Technology Officer of a software company, and I would not pay extra for someone with an advanced degree.

While it is true that most every company these days has a tuition reimbursement policy, it is primarily one of those things a company has to offer to stay competitive in the search to attract and retain employees. It has virtually nothing to do with needing that employee to gain the extra knowledge acquired via an advanced degree.

YMMV.

51

But I haven’t seen (or maybe I just overlooked) any of the anti-raise/pro-fiscal responsibility people saying that the quantity and quality of our current crop of teachers is perfectly acceptable.

52

Sure there are pitfalls with any system and I am considering that people will do what they can to maximize their personal compensation. That is why you don’t take just one of these but all of these and maybe a few others besides. It is harder to rig the system the more things you have to rig. In addition there are other ways to minimize the effect or incentive to rig the system.

Standardized Test Scores: As I mentioned before I believe different aspects of teacher ‘grading’ needs to be given various weight when considering their overall picture. What the exact weighting would be I couldn’t say but is one of those things I believe get tweaked over time as issues become apparent. If standardized tests had, say, a 10% weighting teachers may not be overly concerned with them to the point they they only teach the test.

Percent Improvement: For this one I was visualizing percent improvement over the previous year. This eliminates your hard test early easy tests later concern.

Peer Grading: I considered the chance of teachers banding together to rig the outcome. A simple measure would be to setup a standalone PC and printer in an office and schedule teachers at the end of the school year to go in and rank their fellows on a pre-prepared grading document. The results for each teacher would be printed separately and dumped into a locked box. No names would be used on any document. The Principal could extract the papers once all teachers have done their thing. While I might agree to scratch your back if you scratch mine there is no way for either party to verify that the other had kept their promise. One would hope that most teachers would be honest. You could also play it like some Olympic sports where the highest grade and lowest grade for each teacher are thrown out and the rest fo the results averaged. This would mitigate issues of favoritism or backbiting. The whole system would be relatively easy to implement as well.

In the end it all comes down to the Principal. The take the whole lot of various grading methods and mix it together modified by appropriate weighting. As I mentioned these somewhat objective results will be weighed against other intangibles such as how well liked the teacher is among the students, positive attitude and so on. In balance I think it might work ok. As with any system you will likely find some who will bend over backwards to defeat its purpose. So be it. You patch what holes you can as you find them and hope the Principal can makeup the difference.

I believe I answered this in my previous post but I’ll reiterate. Merit based raises introduces incentives to teachers to excel. When excellent teacher A gets paid the same as crappy teacher B there isn’t much incentive for Teacher A to continue busting their ass. Certainly some teachers may do so out of moral obligation or a strong work ethic but it would be nice to distinguish those who excel and those who just limp by. With a reasonable certainty of future gain a teacher may be more likely to go that extra mile or to think up new and creative teaching methods. Additionally those teachers who are really good will be encouraged to stick it out as they get better and better salaries. Those teachers that stink will to some extent be naturally purged by the system. Teachers win AND students win with this result.

As to budgets they may not be the most important outcome but they are an unfortunate reality of life. It would be nice to have limitless resources but ultimately a school has finite resources and has to decide how to best allocate them. A system that helps both teachers and students as I described above seems to be a good solution. The current system certainly isn’t working so well.

Finally I don’t understand resistance to ANY change until it can somehow be proven to be infallible for all parties. That will never happen. I’m not suggesting people should jump blindly but rather move forward with some educated guesses and then keep modifying till it’s as good as it can reasonably get.

Perfectly acceptable? No but what is? Teachers are much like any other profession in this regard. Most fall in the middle somewhere with a few at the extremes of good and bad. On the whole I have no issue with the professionalism or abilities of our nation’s teachers. Frankly they’re probably a slightly better lot on average than what you find in the business world at large but that’s just my opinion.

53

I agree with Whack-a-mole’s comments about the ability to create a pay-for-performance mechanism that works. I have no experience in the educational field, but I do have lots of experience with pay-for-performance plans in the business world. I have found that using a variety of objective indicators to assess performance, combined with 360 degree subjective feedback, provides an excellent and reliable measure of that employee’s performance.

360 degree feedback, for those who might not be familiar with the terminology, means that the employee is evaluated from all directions… from the boss, from the peers, and from the subordinates. Subordinates in this case would be the students. Interestingly enough, the “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” behavior does not occur when the pool of money that salary increases are drawn from is fixed.

I think that the ultimate antecedent to a student’s success is their attitude towards education, which is highly influenced by their teacher (granted, the parents have an even greater influence, but I don’t have the slightest clue how to address that problem). One of the performance indicators for the teacher might be the satisfaction of the student regarding their learning experience. Sure, there might be a group of isolated disgruntled kids who’d never give favorable feedback, but they’d be in the minority. And the important measure would be the magnitude and direction of change over time. Not necessarily the raw score.

Of course, none of this matters if the system is unable to get rid of incompetent teachers. I have a close friend who is a principle of our local middle school. He says his number one frustration is his inability to fire a lousy teacher. What they typically have to do in order to get rid of a teacher is to eliminate the position (which is an option only if the lousy teacher is low on the totem pole). That certainly doesn’t help the kids.

Lastly, I think this discussion has gotten a little off track by focusing so heavily on teacher’s pay. In the end, the good teachers (like any good employee in any business) are not motivated by pay alone. Study after study (sorry no cites right now) indicates that pay does not typically appear in the top five when asked to list the things that influence a person’s job satisfaction.

54

I get a bit perplexed when I hear resistance (from the usual {unnamed} crowd) with regards to standardized testing. If you were following events in DC a few months back, the furor and screaming that occured prior to passage of the new & improved education reform bill was almost deafening. The lobbyists in support of the status quo were constantly throwing out the “teaching to the test” argument.

The way I see it, if students are given quarterly or semi-annual standardized (well written & confidential) tests there’s no way any teacher could teach to the test.

  1. There’s too much material too cover if you give a test once every 3-4 months.
  2. Well written tests give insight not only to a students knowledge of facts, but also their reasoning and cognitive skills.
  3. With regard to the sciences; provided they’re are a large number of general knowledge questions pertaining to that subject - it would be impossibe to teach to the test.
  4. With regards to English/Math; Most tests in these subjects require knowledge & reasoning skills…you either “get it or you don’t”. I think it would be almost impossible to teach to a test with regards to any math subject (algebra, geom., trig. etc.) and even more impossible with regards to grammar/writing.
55

Regardless of what the philosophies of individual employers are, Algernon is essentially correct. If you want to learn how to do just about any job, getting an education is extremely inefficient.

The only exception I can think of medical school, which universally requires work study.

I’m not just talking about college, I’m talking about the entire school system.

The curriculum of the entire school system is out of touch with the skills valued in the work force (excluding the education work force).

I think many people would agree with the statement that something is wrong with the school system. So the most important question to answer is, what do we expect the school system to accomplish?

If you ask parents of grade school children what they want from the school system, most want them to ‘get a good education’ which means, roughly, the opportunity to attend a good university. So they want to see good, respectable grades, good standardized test scores, and good extra-curricular activities (mainly sports).

But all of this is completely defined by what colleges look for. Most people would agree that the selection process by colleges is woefully arbitrary.

Next, what do people look for in a college? Mostly, they look for respectability of the diploma.

What do businesses look for in college graduates? Respectibility of the diploma.

What determines how respectable a diploma is? 1. Historical respectibility, 2. selectiveness in undergraduates, 3. quality of recent research (performed by post graduates, not undergraduates).

In essence, the education system provides this giant sorting of entry-level employees, but the sorting is almost completely unrelated to any metric that might actually matter in the work force.

The work force asks, “Do you have anyone who’s good with assembling TH-R30s?” and the education system replies, “We have someone who knows what a transister is, sort of!” The work force asks, “Do you have anyone who knows how to maximize productivity in an office environment?” and the education system replies, “We have someone who can do simple calculus!” etc.

In short, the education system completely fails to accomplish its most important purpose, which is to match the capabilities of graduates to the requirements of jobs.

By and large, all of the metrics we use to judge the effectiveness of schools are completely irrelevant. Who cares whether students’ standardized test scores are up or down? Really. Basic geometry is only valuable if they are going to be geometry teachers, landscapers, or machinists. And most landscapers and machinists don’t know the most basic geometry. What good is ‘holding teachers accountable’ if what you’re holding them accountable for is arbitrary.

There was a time when arithmetic and spelling were actually vocationally important. But now we have pocket calculators for $1 and word processing programs in every single office.

It is completely absurd that using a calculator during an arithmetic class is considered cheating! Why not teach kids how to use a calculator, and then spend the hours you’d spend teaching them how to carry and find the remainder teaching them how to operate a spreadsheet? Spreadsheets are applicable to just about every modern vocation. And adding by hand is a bad habit in just about every vocation.

56

I figured you were. I just wanted to tease it out a little more for my own edification.

Okay, I get it so far. Although, I don’t think we need to charachterize this behavior as “rigging the system” and I appologize if I put it out there that way. When you’re setting up an incentive system you must be sure that your system elicits the behavior you want. The onus is on us to think it through beforehand.

So let’s examine the outcomes that you are promoting:

So you would like to see teachers who:
teach students to do well on standardized tests
improve each year (I’m still not clear how they improve, I guess)
are well liked by faculty and students and
have a positive attitude.

Are each of these necessary?
Together are they sufficient?
At the risk of repeating myself, what is it that you would like public schools to accomplish anyway?

Teachers should “excel,” “bust their ass,” and “go that extra mile.”
What does that mean?
Teachers should not be “crappy,” “limp by,” or “stink.”
What does that mean?
You say we should reward “new and creative teaching methods.”
Does that mean that a teacher would be rewarded for forgoing proven methods, like say phonics, in favor of new untested methods, like say “reading through ESP”?

I agree that we must work within budgets.
I think I would be more satisfied if you explained more fully how your proposal would help both teachers and students (especially the students).
**

Above you note that the current system isn’t working so well, but here you seem to be satisfied with the quantity and quality of our nation’s teachers. What, then, is to blame for the failures of the current system?
Is it the students? If so how do we address this?
Is it the unions? Do they prevent otherwise qualified teachers from working up to their potential?
Is it the principals? I hope not, because that would make this quote seem very strange:

**

**

I’m all for change. I just want to see that the change is motivated by the best interests of the students, not the teachers or the local budget. I think that’s a pretty reasonable requirement considering that the subject of our experiment is the nation’s future (to borrow a trite phrase).

57

I swear I don’t want to be in the {unnamed} crowd.
But I’m going to have to ask for a cite here.

58

Sorry for the triple post, but there’s many interesting things being said here while I’m busy typing.

Thank you jawdirk for addressing these issues. These are questions I have thought about a great deal, coming from a family of teachers, without a firm conclusion. And I think they get to the heart of the OP (IMO).

**
I agree.
My personal answer is that the highest goal of education is to produce happy, well adjusted adults.

**
That seems right in my experience.
Although, I feel compelled to ask whether the “consumers” of the public education system are rightly construed to be the parents or the children. I’m really not sure and I think reasonable people could disagree. And I think it would affect the solutions ultimately offered.

**
Well, okay. But I thought you just said that businesses look for a respectable diploma (which is fairly accurate in my experience). Does this mean that the root of our education problem lies in the mismatch between hiring practices and job requirements?

I would agree that the metrics we currently use are not adequate.
But I would have felt cheated not to have ever learned geometry.
More importantly, I do feel (not cheated, but) really dumb for not having gotten more work experience before leaving school.
I also think you’re dead wrong about calculators and spreadsheets, at least on an elementery school level. My girlfriend works in accounting, she uses spreadsheets every day. But she’s a functioning innumerate. She never learned the principles underlying the machine so she calls me any time something is tricky.

59

Alas, I think “To get into a good university” is too narrow a goal. It is indeed an important purpose/outcome among some families, but I suspect they are in the minority.

If you go by the college participation rate for dependent 18-24 year olds in the U.S., it’s at about 59% now. And of that total, not all of them probably had entrance into a quality university as the end goal of their secondary schooling. About a quarter of them are in 2-year colleges, for example, and while some will aim to transfer to a 4-yr college, not all care to.

I do think, however, that future admission to a good postsecondary school is an top goal among certain socioeconomic groups, and they may the ones who have the strongest voice and the most political clout when it comes to school reform. Or not, maybe, because they might already be located in towns where the schooling is superior, so they don’t have a personal stake in the issue.

60

I disagree with your personal answer to your question. My answer is that happy, well adjusted adults should be produced by family and/or friends (and religion if that’s your thing too). The purpose of school is an education. I don’t want to send my kid to school to learn how to best get in touch with their inner self. They are there to learn to read, write, do arithmetic, learn history and so on. That they get a great deal of socialization from school is a side effect of the nature of a school and not a school’s primary purpose. At its most fundamental level ideally a school will instill a love of learning for the sake of learning alone into its students.

I think the notion that primary schools merely exist to get into a good university is disingenuous. All adults should have at the least a basic background in math, english, the sciences and history. My father-in-law is an electrician and never went to college but he can still hang in most conversations because he had a solid education as a youth in the basics. What books didn’t teach him life has to a large extent and he is naturally smart enough to assimilate what he experiences. I see no need for a college to be the only end-goal of every person.

I think my answers standup just fine. I can come up with 1- adjectives to describe a ‘crappy’ teacher but the list would be incomplete and not really hit the mark. “Bust their ass” and “go the extra mile” are for teachers and a school’s administration to determine. “Go the extra mile” might have a very different meaning in an inner city school than a suburban wealthy school. I won’t attempt to define it for all cases because the mark is too broad.

In the simplest terms I want to get a vibrancy and life back into the school system. What does that mean? Loosely a school that students AND teachers look forward to going to each day. A school that parents want to be a part of. A school that is innovative in finding ways to accomplish this goal.

As for teaching kids “reading through ESP” are you suggesting that all the progress we are likely to make in education has already occurred? We can stop here and now and say we have arrived at the ultimate system of teaching?

Certainly teachers can’t just hightail it off into some personal experiment with their classrooms. Teaching plans need to be discussed and I would hope approved by their peers, the administration or something. If a new teaching idea occurs to them they can put it before their peers and hash it out and see if they can find a workable to implement it AND test its successfulness.

That said I think teachers should have more latitude in their classes. Every new method need not be a new way to teach a subject. A teacher might find a new way to distinguish which methods work best for a particular student and allow them to learn in the method that best suits them. Mary may prefer reading it out of a book, Johnny may be hands on, Louis may want diagrams, Jane may prefer to learn in a group, Oscar may rather go it alone. I realize that not every subject lends itself to all these methods (sometimes you’re stuck with rote memorization) but I hope you get my drift. From this maybe a school could learn how to parcel students of particular styles to teachers that are more adept at teaching in those styles. Our current system wouldn’t allow such a thing. NOTE: I am not saying any of this is easy to do or even possible…I’m merely detailing some possible examples. I’ll leave it to the teachers to actually figure out what does or doesn’t work. They just need the latitude to explore the possibilities.

I thought I already did. A system that encourages and rewards teachers that excel (as defined by their peers and the administration and perhaps parents and students) and does NOT reward teachers that do not do well with automatic raises. The students would be helped because those teachers who are good will get higher raises and are more likely to stay with teaching. At the very least they may avoid burnout and not feel as set upon if they do extra work without immediate compensation. Those teachers who aren’t so good are more likely to drop out of the system (and Principals should be allowed to fire bad teachers where necessary).

Good teachers stay and get paid better…good for the godd teachers. Bad teachers leave the profession which may be bad for them but is good for students and everyone else.

I am satisfied that the majority of teachers are at least competent or better at doing their profession. Unfortunately much of the school issues are out of their control. School funding needs to change. Parents need to have their expectations reset. The state needs to stop mucking around with the system endlessly. And yes, the unions need to back down. In my personal opinion the unions are the lynch pin in this whole mess. Their army of lobbyists and clear concern for their own interests (not the teachers or the students) stands in the way of any real progress. Certainly improvement can come from many directions but I think the unions (NEA/AFT) are the largest obstructions to meaningful change. See my post much earlier in this thread for more detail on that.