What does "managing the status of the teaching profession" mean? Preventing politicians from slandering teachers and their unions? Not letting Ben Stein play a teacher in the movies? It seems to me that if you follow Germany or South Korea, where income inequality is much lower than in the US, and you pay teachers 141% of per capita GDP, then in effect there are not all that many occupations that are much higher paid. It kind of seems like it all boils down to paying teachers more, despite McKinsey's effort to suggest that there are really multiple factors at work.

This is a fucking shame.

I've been saying for a long time that the most important things for the *long term* health of this country are (1) Campaign finance reform and (2) better pay for public schoolteachers.

#2 is so important because it helps keep good people in the system, and there is absolutely nothing a society can do to compensate for not educating its workforce. Educated people are more likely to be productive, healthy, inventive ... you can list the benefits for as long as your pencil holds up.

And if you don't get people educated and invested in learning early, there is absolutely nothing you can do to make up for it later. The costs to society (relative to the alternative) will continue to accrue for the entire lifetimes of those people.

BETTER TEACHERS, BETTER SCHOOLS.

You can have the best teachers and the best schools, but so long as you have students coming from dysfunctional families (poorly educated parents, single parent, drug or alcohol problems, voting Rethug), you will still have children who fail. Some children coming from bad family backgrounds will somehow succeed. Most will not.

As I have posted here many times - the biggest problem in American public education is problem parents.

Here's where teacher's unions are really screwing people - kids and new teachers. They gerrymander negotiations to reward those making the most - usually people that are already earning some of the highest incomes in the communities where they teach.

The screw the new person fiscally and support the "old-school" folks in running the newer teachers out of the system - most starting do not make 5 years because the system is so heavily staked against them.

I know it will piss some people off - but those that taught in the 1970's and are still in education (more than you think) usually CANNOT WORK WITH TODAY'S YOUTH, multiculturalism, technology, or the needs of "digital natives."

Unfortunately, with the help of teacher's unions - they ensure that no one that is ready to work with today's students actually gets a chance.

Jeff - you are so ignorant - blame game gets us no where and, whether you like it or not, family life has radically changed in the past 20 years. People like you ensure that the gap between educators and students continues to grow and grow.

And haven't you got a great idea.... Let's just blame the families and give teachers a big fat raise for sittin' on their butts pointing their fingers - actually, giving everyone else the finger.

As a society, we are unwilling to pay for public education because all that white people's money would go to educating black and brown kids. And some might even be *horrors* illegal immigrants. Can't risk that!

$20 billion a year? What does Iraq cost?

We've got the money. The will... I dunno.

Re family life: more jobs for working people. Let's say we devote some serious money to infrastructure repair in this country. When parents have decent jobs, health insurance, and enough income to pay for basics, plus reasonable hours, they have the wherewithal to be good parents.

You could probably make a chart comparing the decline of the American family (i.e. alcoholism rates, children in foster care, divorce etc.) to the decline of the manufacturing job and see the lines parallel each other.

Blame doesn't help much. Love and attention do. I wish there were political will to take care of business in this country: fix infrastructure, fix healthcare payment, fix low investment in teachers and schools. People talk about it, but then they vote for the guys who promise tax breaks for billionaires and $600 checks for the rest of us.

*

On what grounds do we have a failing education system? Standardized tests? Inability to complete group work? What? How do we know that we're low performing and how do we know that the measure we're using is valid?

Whatever the case, I would certainly support higher pay for teachers that would allow those of us who don't come from money to consider it as a career option (without also considering a lifetime of struggling financially.)

But I really would like to know why we just assume that it's a given that our education system sucks. What's the evidence?

How about the fact that men who are teachers, even if they're heterosexual, "aren't much better than women"? And gay men who are teachers are basically thought of as pedophile rapists.

My father came home from a parent-teacher day that included meeting my first- or second-grade teacher screaming (completely hysterically), quote, "THE GUY'S A FAGGOT! A FAGGOT! HE'S A FAGGOT! OH, I KNOW WHO TO TALK WITH ABOUT THIS! I KNOW WHO TO SPEAK WITH ON THE SCHOOL BOARD!" Etc., etc. The teacher soon lost his job and did not finish the term.

Not that my father usually spoke this way--this was probably the most extreme I ever saw--but who wouldn't be panicked upon learning that their child's teacher is, you know, a faggot?

And I've seen other examples--a gay teacher committing suicide by blowing his brains out, another gay teacher losing his job.

All three gay teachers mentioned here, for various personality and teaching-style reasons, probably shouldn't have been teaching anyone, but getting axed (or dying) for homosexuality--no, that's not fair.

Jeff II:

Why does the US have so many more problem parents then than Germany or S Korea? Just saying it doesn't mean it's so. Give us some background on your opinion.

The main issue with teachers is the INCREDIBLE AMOUNT of TOTALLY MEANINGLESS BULLSHIT that they must put up with. My wife teaches French. She teaches in a very good high school - always in the top 100 list (you must apply to get in although it's a public).

Every time there is a new superintendent, she has to redo her teaching objectives/lesson plans. This mickey mouse bullshit crap takes a huge amount of time, and is JUST MEANINGLESS. She pays no attention to the lesson plans, since you can plan some parts, but can't plan other parts. Regardless, at this point, her lessons are pretty well mapped out. Regardless, every time there's a new super, the lesson plans are redone, on new forms. She just takes the old ones and dumps them into the new format, since it's all just bullshit.

Another problem that teachers have - in many places, there is no secretarial support. Instead of meeting with students or parents, she must copy tests, lessons and other materials herself.

So, to improve teaching, 1) cut out the bullshit timewasting crap and 2) give teachers help with copying and other time-wasting tasks.

JeffII is absolutely correct. That's the one part of the teaching situation you can't fix - the parents. Learning is a 3-legged stool - the student must want to learn, the teacher must encourage this desire, and the parent must support the teacher and the student.

One of the main problems with inner city schools is the huge number of single parent families there. If you are a single parent with more than one kid, the support that kid will get from the parent is ZERO-NONE-NADA-ZILCH. If there is one child, that is a possible situation. But you basically need 1 parent for 1 child. With my family, we have 3 children, and there are 2 of us. Fortunately, the last 2 are twins, and we could treat them somewhat the same, although they are less like one another than any two persons on the planet.

If we wish to improve inner city schools, it is vital that we improve inner city families.

But first of all, you need a competent principal and/or superintendent. A school is hopeless if its managed by some hack fobbed off by political patronage.

Who pays the teachers as well as supporting the retirees? The local taxpayer does,so if the plan is to subsidize local school districts to improve starting pay, that;s fine with me.
Oh, and get rid of NCLB another useless piece of legislation.

$20 billion a year? What does Iraq cost?

Roughly $10B a month. $120B - $20B = $100B left over. A no-brainer...in just about any other country but the one we live in.

Not real crazy about using per capita percentage of GDP as the basis of comparison, what with income distribution in those countries not being especially similar. Apples and oranges.

There's one "problem" with that statistic, which is that the ratio of US average to US median salary is probably larger than in those other countries, because we have such a high skew to the very rich in our income distribution.

That is, you might get a similar picture, whether it was teachers, or plumbers, or engineers.

The income skew is a separate problem.

don't forget to add to the salary the taxpayer contributions to teacher pension funds and the usually low out of pocket teacher contributions for benefits.

Why does the US have so many more problem parents then than Germany or S Korea? Just saying it doesn't mean it's so. Give us some background on your opinion. Posted by: omar

We probably don't, though poverty is increasing in the U.S. as is illegal immigration. Both factor significantly in poor school performance.

However, the U.S. also doesn't have the multi-tiered secondary education system you find in Europe and much of East Asia. Therefore, the least capable or the most disadvantaged children here tend to track along with their better off peers dragging down test scores.

If you compare kids in the U.S. attending private schools or schools in more affluent suburbs to their opposite number around the world, you find that our scores in just about every subject are the equal if not better.

Jeff II,

Rich parents are not better parents. They can just hire nannies/tutors for their kids. Give poor kids all the same one-to-one extras and they will improve.

Status is important. Teachers are considered to be babysitters, not professionals. And this isn't just in the public schools. Most "teaching" colleges treat staff the same way.

If someone came up with evidence that some degree or kind of teacher training substantially improved long-term educational outcomes in children, we could invest in that. If we had evidence that teacher characteristics - say their SAT verbal scores - made a substantial difference, we could try to hire them. I don't know of any convincing evidence of either.

We can't rely heavily on hiring lots of teachers with high ability even if that strategy _did_ have a high payoff, because there are about two million elementary and secondary teaching slots to fill: they can't all have 750 verbal SAT scores.

Jeff II, Rich parents are not better parents.

No, but it's a fact that they are typically better educated and often natively more intelligent.

They can just hire nannies/tutors for their kids. Give poor kids all the same one-to-one extras and they will improve.

Yep. I agree (in fact that's implied in what I wrote). But most poor kids don't get one-to-one tutoring or mentoring of any kind and that's why they perform poorly even if they are natively intelligent. They need a leg up that very few school districts, often even those in the suburbs, can afford to offer.

Status is important. Teachers are considered to be babysitters, not professionals.

Maybe you think of teachers that way. My wife and I sure don't. We consider them partners in raising our children. Not only that, I pay babysitters a lot more by the hour than what I'm taxed for public education.

And this isn't just in the public schools. Most "teaching" colleges treat staff the same way.
Posted by: jen flowers

Let me guess, you are a failed teaching candidate? You can't possibly have been an English major at least not in a country where it's the main language. Otherwise, the last bit of your post doesn't really make sense starting out as it does with one point and ending with another.

These comparisons make no sense. Based on my experience working in both Europe and the US, starting salaries *across the board* here are much lower as a percentage of average, or later-career salaries. Americans just start at a very low place comparatively, then increase faster. To make sense the study would have to compare Teacher starting salaries as a percent of the average starting salary across nations.

Plus we need to manage their status better and *cough* pay McKinsey to develop strong processes for selecting and training them. No idea what that would cost or what it would take. But food for thought, in any case.

Your last point is worth emphasizing, Kevin. Ask many, if not most, teachers no longer in the profession why they left, and it rarely has anything to do with salary or the clientele (contra the suggestions of some of the commenters thus far). For the most part, they're aware of the status of both of those issues when they go into it. In the case of the former, many of them go into teaching in spite of the comparatively modest pay. In the case of the latter, many of them go into teaching precisely *because* the situations in some communities are so dire. But many of them leave because of the sheer incompetence at the administrative levels -- at the levels of both district & school. And many others -- some of them quite bright & potentially capable -- are set up for failure by the shoddy job done by teaching colleges & credentialing establishments. In my city, many of those schools are staffed by "professors" who've never set foot in public school classrooms, and by adjunct instructors who were Peter Principled up & out of the system -- or, worse, by hacks who were (correctly) run out of the system before they could be Peter Principled. Anyway, my many & mosts betray the anecdotal nature of my points, but at some point people are going to have to take stock of the quality of the training programs -- both the educational & professional components.

A subject I know something about, being a long time urban school administrator. A few facts:

1. Poverty accounts for about 62% to 68% of the variance in student achievement

2. I deal in a system where parents are largely absent, so I need no lectures from JeffII, thank you very much. We're not supposed to do anything? We still have to learn 'em. And many do rise above absent parents. We owe it to them. Every child deserves a good education, regardless of their home lives. For many if not most of the kids I serve, it's all they have.

3. Ignore the "Schools suck" crowd. A close look at the data and their decripit theories wither. Their distoring of data tells you what you need to know. We're all over the map, but that is in part because the STATE, not the feds, is the central organizing principle of American education, and will remain so unless the Constitution is changed.

4. It's the Pre-K - 3 piece, stupid.

5. We have accountability systems (NCLB and states), and most of you guys don't get it either: We continue to pretend student performance and school performance are the same. So we end up punishing high performing schools serving kids in poverty, who do real value-added work, while rewarding upper-middle class schools coasting on their parents' incomes. We use test scores as a proxy for freakin' everything. Get it?

6. Read some, oh, Gary Orfield. Schools serving kids in poverty have a fundamentally different mission than schools serving the middle and upper-middle classes. Schools serving the general population have little impact on their life trajectories. Most of us intuitively understand this (greater explanation below). But we also understand that inner-city and dirt-poor rural schools can help poor bright kids get the brass ring of life. Heck, who has historically made up the backbone of our education system? Poor bright kids made good.

7. Mother's education is the most powerful indicator of socio-economic status. It trumps census tract, the Lunch Code, incomes, you-name it. Specifically, 82% of the variance of SES. Add father's education and you have 96% of the variance. A quality Pre-K can hugely close the gap.

8. Principals matter the most. Principals are the metric.

9. Tenure had meant to protect good teachers, not rotten teachers. Unions that define themselves by their ability to defend their worst member, a rotten teacher who the union officials wouldn't have their own kids in front of, is going the way of the . . . well, guess. But it's still a problem. Tenure is not the problem - it's just the right to due process. Unions and school administrators on the same page about rotten teachers can take care of the problem.

10. The greatest disaster in American education is our institutional addiction to retaining kids, especially in the elementary grades. Don't get me started.

Warmest regards,
MaxGowan

The couple teachers I've known complained about the bureaucracy, sure, but mostly it was the students. Parental negligence has to factor in.

But why has the US culture coarsened faster than other OECD countries? I blame capitalism and television, separately and together, while other countries have more of an innate, historical "culture" providing resistance to the basest-pleasure-satisfying machine.

I would have to agree with Junebug to some extent in that the overall quality of our teacher preparation programs is absolutely horrible. Probably less than 10% of all teacher preparation programs are rigorous enough to enable their graduates to become successful teachers. Most focus largely on designing lesson plans but spend virtually no time on developing classroom management skills. You can write the best lesson plans in the world, but if you don't have the skills to manage a 25-35 student classroom, none of your terrific lessons plans are going to make a difference.

Additionally, what Junebug said about administrators is spot on. Virtually every former teacher I know, myself included, quit the profession due to being fed up with incompetent administrators.

Most of the people I know who tried to be education majors were soon driven out by the inanity of the courses. Education majors have to take innumerable boring, vapid, useless courses about how to teach. Consequently, they get to take fewer interesting courses and end up far less well-educated than almost any other majors in the sciences, humanities or social sciences.

Until people who teach history are genuine, ya know, history majors and so forth, we're not likely to have many good teachers. Consequently, we're not likely to have good schools.

Although: some data indicates that the most important factor is parents who value education.

Jig-saw puzzles can be frustrating things to solve. Many pieces, some easily identified and correctly placed. Others can be examined seemingly indefinitely to no avail. Then a key piece is found and many others fall into place, and on it goes.

There are so many problems confronting public education. Most of the energy and debate seems to be spent (ironically enough) on the easier pieces while the key problems/pieces are tabled, maybe because they are just too tough and/or expensive to deal with.

How do we decide on what the mission of public schools should be? Right now they are turning into intricate multi-leveled social service providers. As focus expands, everything suffers.

What should the basic structure of schools be? As of now they are still based on 19th century agrarian foundations.

Since “school-ready skills� are so important, how can we either 1) hold parents accountable to make the time and capital investments in their children (as simple as having a variety of books around and taking the time to read to/with your youngster),or 2) providing the intervention and support to see that #1 is provided externally?

Is it right to base so much school funding on local property values when those values can fluctuate (like this and the next year) so unevenly? And then, the taxes on those values are voted on by a population loathe to increase their own local taxes and often woefully uncaring of providing any additional money to solve problems that they feel they do not own.

Until the above and other over-arching problems are identified and solved, arguing over teacher pay, training or any of these “easier� pieces is just plain foolish. Further, given the high mobility of the student population, those over-arching problems probably cannot be successfully dealt with at the state level to be truly effective.

We have much work to do.

Since Singapore was mentioned, I weigh in with some comments as I live here and my kids attend local schools.
1. About 5 years ago, the government began a comprehensive overhaul of the teaching profession, school syllabus, funding, etc. They took a 20 year time horizon to make sure that what was being taught and who was doing the teaching would be relevant to the requirements of society over the same time period. For example, anticipating the requirement for workers in the bio-medical field, the science curriculum was revamped and exposure to Science starts now at Grade 2.
2. Teachers’ salaries and benefits have been significantly upgraded, the administrative burdens overhauled and performance standards for schools implemented island-wide. This has allowed for a significant reduction in teacher turn-over which a few years ago were rampant. It also allows parents greater transparency on school performance and poor performing principals are moved out.
3. The Ministry of Education firmly believes in a holistic approach to education. Parents, teachers, students and the community all share responsibility for ensuring kids do the best they can no matter what their family or economic backgrounds. Funding is from the general revenue so that no school is dependent on the local property value for funding.

So here’s the challenge for Americans to deal with in looking to alternative countries for fixes to its education system. Are Americans willing to give up “local control� of schools systems (including curriculum); fund school systems directly from general revenue (federal) instead of property taxes (or more strange – state lotteries); hold schools accountable for performance (NCLB has been a abortion in implementation but who can argue that schools get a pass on performance reviews?); and recognize that creating, directing and providing education is not something that can be outsourced to the private sector.

Singapore’s success of providing basic education to its citizens is not rocket science. However, I’m not sure the American public is willing to follow the same route.

You can't look at Singapore and make it a local vs federal issue. Singapore is such a small country that the local and federal levels are almost the same thing.

Back to America, the federal government needs to see its role as supporting local schools, and the local schools need to see their role as supporting teachers. Fully fund Title I and IDEA, and schools serving poor students will have a chance to succeed. Spend the federal funds on really bad tests, and you get the current situation with NCLB.

Also, thanks for some good points, MaxGowan.

By local vs. federal control, I mean the issue of who sets the standards, the curriculum, the teacher training, etc. Absolutely Singapore is a very small country but the government doesn't allow the local communities to decide these things. And though a small country don't think for a minute that local communities dominated by different racial or religious make-ups don't want to influence what goes on in the community schools. The government refuses to turn this over to the people saying instead the national interest in ensuring uniformity in these areas override local interest in seeing things done their way. Treat education as a states rights/local control issue and you get the local, state, and region disparity that shows up on every test ever given in the USA.

My brother retired from teaching high school some years ago, an all too typical burnt out cynical wreck. He still comments on how when he taught in Germany he made more than the plumbers and electricians, unlike in the U.S. He once took on a bunch of his fellow NRA'ers at a gun show when they complained that German schools were so much better than U.S. schools; replying that in Germany education was taken more seriously, the kids did not miss school days to go hunting, and teachers were much better paid and enjoyed a much high social status.

Having the benefit of listening to the teachers in my extended family, I can assure anyone who didn't like hearing what JeffII had to say: bad parenting is one of the biggest problems in trying to teach. And "bad" encompasses a litany complaints, the worst of which are the parents who refuse to work WITH the teacher. They spend parent-teacher conferences deflecting the blame for their child's poor performance instead of trying to figure out how to improve the performance. This denial crosses all socioeconomic boundaries, although it's most prevalent in the middle and upper classes where the feeling of entitlement torques up the "What?! The fruit of MY loins is having problems?!" sentiments.

This is not to say that poor administrators and prisons posing as schools aren't also huge problems but everything else is irrelevant if the child can't be bothered to learn and worse, is excused from learning by parents in denial.

Re: the other countries' higher performance...they have respect for education, pure and simple. School is not just a place to park the kids and college is not just the place you automatically go to after graduating high school. Students and parents in other countries see education as a challenging process, not a tedious place.

I'm a teacher in South Korea. I wouldn't even remotely consider being one in the US. What does that tell you?

To honestly address the issue, we have to look at all factors. Certainly, we should raise teachers' pay. We should look around the world and see what works, but understand that we have a different culture, and we're not homogeneous. Sure, S. Korea pays more, but they have a higher teacher/student ratio. I agree with Jeff II. Also, let's not discount intelligence. If a student isn't cut out for college, then put him/her in a trade school. Germany has had some success with this. Not everyone is cut out for college. Also, if the culture at home doesn't stress the importance of academics, it's harder for the teacher to teach the student. I disagree that poverty is necessarily an impediment - poor families in China put all their resources towards educating their kids. It's a question of priorities.

Interestingly, DODDS teachers are among the highest paid in the world. If high salaries are good enough for federal teachers, why not your local teachers?

One of the real problems in teaching - beside low pay and the unions (although unions are generally a good thing, and the good teacher unions are worth promoting), is that a person with a doctorate can teach in any university in our country - but not in our elementary or secondary schools. It's called barriers to entry.

Working with one of our country's most acclaimed teacher mentor programs, one thing we find with second career teachers: It's a bifurcated population - either crash and burn or work out magnificently, superb teaching.

I am convinced that great teachers are born, not made. As we do better in professionalizing our teaching corps, we need to allow great natural teachers to "audition." Incidentally, in New York State, teachers can make close to or better than $100,000 for nine months. The ones that do in our system are fantastic and deserve every cent.

I agree with some posters that Ed programs in this country can lack rigor. In my own college education, I dropped the Education major when I realized the Ed. department didn't care at all if I knew anything about my subject matter--I just had to know Ed. theory and know how to do a lesson plan.

Real education can't happen if the person in charge is simply a facilitator who reads a slightly more detailed textbook than the students. What's missing in many secondary classrooms, I suspect, is actual knowledge and expertise in specific subject areas. The system "works" insofar as the teacher usually knows more than students, but only because he or she has the curriculum and instructor's editions at hand and the students don't have the one or read their own textbooks.

The idea of starting salaries at $44K sounds like a good idea on one hand, and I do believe these people need to be paid more, but many college professors I know in the Humanities start at that salary after 10 years more in school than teachers with B.A.'s out of college. As a college professor myself, the implication that these Ed majors make what I make after a PhD is, well, troubling to me. In fact, many of my graduate students are teachers who are getting their MA to get a bigger salary. I'm teaching these people--who are, by and large, bright and hard working--but if they already made more money than me, and I was teaching them so they'd make ever more money, I'd be pretty disgusted with the system. Seems like an increase at one level will demand increases across the board. I'm all for that...

I think Jeff II has stated one of the main problems currently facing education the best: "As I have posted here many times - the biggest problem in American public education is problem parents."

Those who argues against him have probably not worked in large urban public school. Students who come from a background where education is important can learn from any teacher. Certainly they'll learn more from a better teacher, but much of what is taught is merely an introduction to fields of study best explored in depth at a college level. Students who don't have the advantage of parents who believe they can succeed through education are facing a much more difficult road no matter who stands at the front of the classroom.

Well caerochren, as a matter of fact I do work in a large urban public school. So while I understand JeffII's position better than JeffII does, ultimately it is a cop-out. We can't do nothing. We ought to be accountable. We do see kids who rise about dyfunctional families. Do we not see that among the middle class. Where we are in agreement, I am sure, is that quality teaching is the most important thing if not the only thing we should do. The national research is quite clear on that a good reader by third grade - one of the best protective factors for a child in poverty. We owe these kids their fair shot in life. That their parents are absent does not mean we don't owe them. Of course some don't and won't make it - just like their parents. To judge urban schools the same as middle class schools is absurd, of course. But that hardly means we can't be held accountable on fair grounds.

One of the difficulties with education is that teachers are trained to employ one method to reach all students. With large classes it's very difficult to individualize. That method itself changes periodically but the approach does not.

Since education courses are universally boring, the function of an education degree certainly seems to be surviving boredom and following rules exactly. So those are the skills being taught to students who then pass them on to their students. And that's great for training assembly line workers.

As CattyinQueens commented, excellence in one's field is secondary.

I'd also be curious about the class sizes and student/teacher ratios in the various countries.

When I got accepted to the University of Chicago, my mother's family (who live in Switzerland) were ecstatic. I got dozens of letters from even distant relatives.
None of my father's (American) family even knew what the place was. "Is that a state school? A city school? What?"

MaxGowan, re. your reponse to JeffII and caerochren:

We can't do nothing.

As indicated in my previous post, school readiness is a significant issue and by definition parent/family play a large role in this. Yet for many students, this is a huge problem.

I would never suggest that society do nothing about this, but can this issue be solved by more testing, more rigour, or better teacher?

Helped, yes. Solved, no. Society needs to be made aware of problems like this (external to schooling) and prodded into creating solutions. If the greater society does not care enough to engage into such an admittedly difficult process, then the least society can do is stop beating up public education over these type of issues.

Of course, when you look at data from the US you see that teacher compensation correlates poorly with student performance, especially at-risk student performance.

See this post comparing student achievement and teacher compensation in Pennslvania (a state known for high teacher salaries) in 2005.

Teachers compensated at about $8000 per pupil were getting the same results with at-risk kids as those earning $4000.

Keith G.:

As someone who has been in early childhood education since the late 80s, the term "school readiness" is problematic and sets our teeth on edge. Mind you, my organization has created what independent evaluations rank as the best Pre-K system in the U.S. and Western Europe. Those of us in the biz believe that 100% of entering kindergarteners are "ready for school." This is in part because the schools will be ready for the kids. So you are certainly singing to the choir here.

Note my earlier post that notes "It's the Pre-K - 3 piece, stupid." But that a child has a problem on a kindergarten assessment (motor skills, language, cognition, social-emotional, plus vision and hearing) DOES NOT mean that child is "not ready for school." This is a very misleading and destructive use of language, one that has led to the abandonment of developmentally appropriate educational practices in our early grades. As if that will raise reading scores. This is the essence of the battle I am in professionally, FWIW. Hence, the passion.

I find it an interesting selection bias on Mr. Drum's part in pulling out the only chart in the whole study that might be taken to imply that more spending is required to fix public schools.

If Mr. Drum is going to quote the findings, he needs to quote them in context. The study says this in the description of the chart that Mr. Drum includes:

"South Korea and Singapore employ fewer teachers than other systems; in effect, this ensures that they can spend more money on each teacher at an equivalent funding level. Both countries recognize that while class size has relatively little impact on the quality of student outcomes (see above), teacher quality does. South Korea's student-to-teacher ration is 30:1, compared to an OECD average of 17.1, enabling it in effect to double teacher salaries while maintaining the same overall funding level as other OECD countries....

Singapore has pursued a similar strategy but has also front-loaded compensation. THis combination allows it to spend less on primary education than almost any other OECD and yet still be able to attract strong candidates into the teaching profession. In addition, because Singapore and South Korea need fewer teachers, they are also in a position to be more selective about who becomes a teacher. This, in turn, increases the status of teaching, making the profession even more attractive."

The study goes on to make clear that increased spending is in fact a failing strategy for public schools.

If school choice is off the table, then I would be very supportive of a program to increase starting teacher pay, funded by larger class sizes and substantial reductions in useless administrators and assistant principals.

Yeah, since we're becoming a banana republic, let's keep adopting more strategies from other banana republics.

Conversations with school administrators from Singapore is a fascinating experience. They admire us, note that their kids can do the multiple choice tests very, very well - but that they miss the creativity that marks so many American students.

In the TIMSS test - one of the big, most respected international tests in science, math and technologies, the highest performing schools can be found in the U.S. Of course, some of the lowest, too! We're just all over the map.

One of my favorite recent lies by the Schools Suck crowd was their condemming our physics scores being 13th in the world - never mind that the gap between second the 13th was all of two percentile points. That's a page right out of how to lie with statistics.

Whoever heard of a strong country with a weak public school system? Did I miss that memo?

So while I understand JeffII's position better than JeffII does . . . We can't do nothing. Posted by: MaxGowan

Max, no where do I say we do nothing. What I was objecting to and what I always object to with this topic, and what I made very clear in all my posts here, is the knee-jerk reaction to blaming schools and teachers. Neither is responsible for raising anyone's children outright. By default, school serves this function to a greater or lesser degree. However, unless we are prepared, which we have demonstrated time and again as a nation that we aren't, to fund some schools at about twice the level we do now to provide the resources to help those kids that need it, we'll never see improvement for the nation educationally on the whole.

But again, even with the largest net with the smallest grid, many of the most socially and/or financially disadvantaged students will fail because they can't be in the school environment 24-hours a day for five days a week.

. . . is that a person with a doctorate can teach in any university in our country - but not in our elementary or secondary schools. It's called barriers to entry.

And with regard to your comment about PhDs not being allowed to teach in primary and secondary classrooms, says who? At one time, a local HS here in the Shoreline District had a couple PhDs and a couple people with MA/S teaching. In fact, in Washington, the state encourages all it's teachers to get at least an MA/S. As long as you have a teaching certificate, which is now easier to get if you already have a BA/S or higher, you can teach.

You of all people should know that having a background in classroom methodology, especially for primary grades, is crucial. Just as a researcher at a university may be brilliant, but shit in the classroom, having an advance degree doesn't give you all the tools, any of the tools really, to teach children. Hell, it's sometimes difficult to teach college freshmen, who are often still children psychologically.

"So, to improve teaching, 1) cut out the bullshit timewasting crap and 2) give teachers help with copying and other time-wasting tasks."

Posted by: POed Lib on April 2, 2008
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Sounds exactly like the problems in the health care industry.

We want highly-trained individuals to be able to focus entirely on doing what they were trained to do. They want it too. But, somehow the system diverts their time and attention to other things.

Why?

In America our educational system is an apartheid system based on family/district incomes. The more income the higher the property taxes can generally be and the more money can be put into education. Divide it up on a state-wide basis instead of a school district basis and a lot of the two-tier schooling disappears.

If getting better teachers is the primary thing, then getting rid of second-tier schools which can't afford equally good teachers is essential.

How to force a school system to let teachers teach and put the rest of schooling administration on others is where political leadership comes in. It has to be designed into the structure of the school system. Not that it can entirely be done away with. If you're paying a teacher more money, then there's going to be a natural urge to have them do more that the administrator can see and quantify.

Likewise, in the medical system, how can we have doctors doctoring (and perhaps accepting less pay) and have other people exclusively doing the paperwork? It's anti-intuitive to think that this kind of system wouldn't cost more than our present one. But, it's certainly worth trying.

. . .And what do you do for a living, JeffII, that allows you to lecture like this? I, "of all people" do indeed know pedagogy, curriculum, what you call "classroom methodology." I of all people gave you the number you were searching for, that poverty accounts for 62% - 66% of the variance in student performance; that mother's education accounts for 82% of the variance of SES. I was part of the team that built the highest performing Pre-K system in the U.S.

Is it not preposterous that a Ph.D. or Ed.D. or MD have the barriers to entry that they do? And who do ya think built them? Are there not caveats? Did I not lay them out. Go bother to read.

Did I not lay them out. (sic) Go bother to read. Posted by: MaxGowan

Max,

We are on the same page, if you'd bother to read. I wasn't "searching" for the statistics because I already knew them. That's why I wrote what I did about the importance of parental wealth and education level.

I was part of the team that built the highest performing Pre-K system in the U.S. Posted by: MaxGowan

Now you're just being pissy. I don't care if you are Jesus Christ Almighty. Just as it doesn't take a PhD to be a good teacher, particularly at the elementary level, you don't have to be a school administrator to understand what makes for a successful student. Any parent that cares about his or her children's education is usually pretty well-informed about the topic. Furthermore, the chance at an educational brass ring or even a tin one does not hinge solely on a good pre-K education (which didn't even exist a generation ago). Or do you, like Robert Fulghum, subscribe to the notion that everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten?

You have a nice day, too, JeffII

Fulghum's poster hung in my office for many years. I was never suggesting that it takes a Ph.D. to be a good teacher - but that a good Ph.D. can't even be allowed to teach K - 12, which is insane. I am proud and not pissy that I helped build this marvelous Pre-K system.

BTW, quality Pre-K began generations ago.

Sure you knew those statistics; thanks for letting me do the honors.

Fulghum's poster hung in my office for many years.

Right next to your Star Trek poster? I'm pretty sure that's not anything someone should be admitting to if he wants to be taken seriously.

BTW, quality Pre-K began generations ago.Posted by: MaxGowan

Max, that "quality Pre-K began generations ago" isn't the point and you know it. Half-day kindergarten wasn't even required a generation ago. So trying to peddle the notion that pre-K has been a common let alone legally mandated stepping stone to grade school for much more than fifteen or so is, at best, dishonest.

Jeff II makes an important point about the limits of Pre-K. My latest slogan is:

Foundation, not innoculation.

There are policy-makers that really think that Pre-K is all it takes. Of course it's more complex. But for a lot of kids, Pre-K is the necessary foundation for success. The data is not ambiguous about this fact. Look at it this way: While high quality Pre-K cannot guarantee long-term educational success, without it, failure is all but assured. Believe me, I see, every day at work, the great effects of Pre-K slipping through our fingers because of a K - 2 instructional program that is not up to speed. A big part of this problem, as noted earlier, is the abandonment of developmentally appropriate practices. I tell principals all the time, you want to get your reading scores up? Don't take away recess; ensure regular gym; get those motor skill working all the time. They're so freaked out by the tests, it's hard for this stuff to sink in.

Jeff II makes an important point about the limits of Pre-K. My latest slogan is: Foundation, not innoculation. Posted by: MaxGowan

Max,

What about the supposed "failure" of Head Start? How does that figure in?

What failure? Says who? Right wing think tanks. You should see the Cato Institute report. It's a hoot. In fact, Head Start is almost uniformly recognized as one of the most successful policies in the past century. More on that later.

The founder of Head Start, Ed Zeigler, believed a third of Head Starts were excellent, a third middlin' and a third inferior. Bush has really hurt HS, but they keep chuggin' along. Locally, we have seen our HS go from poor to among the best in the U.S.

New York has a Univeral Pre-K which although not fully funded is still well funded. In my city, no four year-old has ever been turned away. Many states have started to implement universal pre-k, and are doing well at least initially.

A meta-analysis we did years ago, looking at the national research, revealed, without even controlling for quality, that Pre-K reduced retention rates by, on average one-third, and special education placement rates by 21%. The latter, we must be careful about, of course. Pre-K will not make a blind kid see nor cure autism. But the bulk of special ed placements are in Learning Disabilities or Other Health Impaired. Emotional Disability is in the double digits. Pre-K can help here.

"It is difficult to imagine a more cost-effective investment for a community than in quality prekindergarten" I have seen the local data, so I know how true this is.

- Council of Economic Advisors, 1998

I would like to second Max's comments regarding PhDs...

There is currently an incredible supply of potentially top-notch teachers who have earned PhDs, but who are finding the job market in academia impossible. In English and history, in particular, there are literally thousands of PhDs looking for teaching jobs. The market is currently grotesque (often 100-500 applying for a single job). The pay at most colleges for an assistant professor in the humanities and social sciences runs about 40-55 thousand (not that much more than for teachers). Even PhDs from Yale, Harvard and Stanford etc. are finding it difficult to get jobs at Southeast Mississippi State.

BUT, to teach at a public school you generally need a teaching certificate... this might not sound like much of a deterrent, but these courses are insulting and inane for top-flight scholars.

Of course many PhDs will make lousy teachers, but many will not, and would love to teach, if encouraged (or can you imagine, recruited!). If a school district simply set up a meeting with any top-flight graduate program, I suspect they would net at least a few.

And it is not about the money, or the inane meetings, the paperwork, or the lack of respect... these are all present at the assistant professor level as well (and we work nights and weekends and 12 months a year).

My take on the comments:
Increase starting salaries. Return the status of teaching to the position it held 30-40 years ago (at least).
Require aspiring teachers to have two majors - Ed. and history/chemistry/whatever. (But what is to be done about elementary teachers who need to be generalists rather than specialists?)
Classroom size should be held to 20-30 pupils maximum. This should be the goal for all school districts.
Provide teacher's aides/secretaries to handle non-teaching related activities.
Teacher's unions and the school administrations have to have the same goals. And parents have to be involved and support the teachers/administration.
All of these aims seem achievable. Probably not at the same time, however.
Personally, I am a believer in neighborhood primary schools that feed into centralized Jr/Sr HS's. They help define neighborhoods and are more accessable (in about every sense of the word) to both children and parents even if they might be economically limited. It might be easier to get (and keep) parents more involved if it isn't a major production just getting to the school.
There is also what appears, at least anecdotally, to be a lack of discipline nowadays that, if true, certainly wasn't there in my school years (K-12/1955-1968). If there is greater indiscipline, I'm not certain about how to go about reducing it. Decreasing the size of schools/classes, while possibly more costly, might help. Embarassment/shame used to be available ("How can I face the neighbors?"), but I'm not certain it could (or should?) be brought back.

When we pay teachers the salaries presently earned by athletic/ and CEO all stars, then we won't have a problem finding good people to teach our children. WE first have to respect teachers as professionals, treat them with dignity, and pay them to be responsbile for educating the minds of our children. Isn't that more important than a 10 year dash or fast ball throw? It should be.

Check out http://detentionslip.org for all the crazy stories about teachers getting into trouble at school. It's one of the leading sources for breaking news in education.

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