This bombardment of emails/posts is always best when I get a response. Here's M's somewhat unorthodox but definitely thought-provoking solution to some of the problems we've talked about with education. I'd better start figuring out who among my kids is the next Steve Jobs!
This leads me to something else I was thinking about. Why does one teacher stick with the same grade their whole lives? It occurs to me that this must belong to the age of industrialization, where a static, regimented, division of labor ruled the roost. Perhaps the thinking is that a teacher would specialize in teaching kids of a certain age, and that customizing to the age, rather than to the student, was the most effective way to go.
But I want to call into question the conventional design in education: teachers shouldn't specialize to age. Rather, they should specialize and customize to the student. The first big change this would entail would be that a teacher might follow the development of a student across ages and grades. And that change brings me to another complaint you've written about in your blog--namely, that teaching does not involve much teamwork and cooperation with other teachers. What if instead of one teacher per student, across time, we had a team of teachers, across time?
The downside is that if a student gets stuck with a poor teacher, they're with that teacher for a very long time. Perhaps change is good. But the reason I disagree is that there seems to be a *star teacher* phenomenon. A star teacher completely changes their students' lives. Fills it with meaning. And of the accounts of heard of, most people remember having one star teacher. Not ten. Throw Kozol in there too. These types are the innovators. We want more of them. And we want to encourage them.
Why do teachers do teachers get paid less than other professions?
My quick answer: because they work with about the same amount of knowledge as blood-letting doctors in the middle ages had.
A more complicated answer: because their patrons (parents) do not reap the benefits of their investment. Let's play here. Let's say some teacher was responsible for Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Every kid that came out of this class turned into the equivalent of a Google founder. What would this mean for the teacher? Well, beyond her salary, nothing much, mainly because there's no way to tie the outcomes to the teacher.
What if every teacher had stock options *in* their students? Similar to how start-ups offer up options in the company before they can pay anyone. Then, when a teacher's students become productive, the teacher can cash their options in....such remuneration will attract talent. Better teachers will create better students.
Okay that's wild speculation. But what I won't accept is this counter-argument: teaching is a noble profession, so out of our civic duty, we ought to pay teachers more. The main reason this is a terrible idea is that bad teachers want more money too. And if there's no way to weed out bad teachers, then giving everyone a raise is a waste of resources.
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2 comments:
Yeah, Kozol's book could be the worst I have ever read in the history of Sociology 104, and that was a class loaded with bad books. Teachers should be specialists across subject matter just as they are in high school, and their also can be supplementary coaches for students as well: teachers who follow their careers in school and provide help, etc.
Hey, be nice to Kozol!
But you raise an interesting point about teaching to subject matter. Clearly that's done in college and high school. But I was suggesting teaching to student. These are two different ideas--but they become the same if we assume a small enough class size, say down to 3 or 5.
Our ancestral environments did not involve competing in social groups of 2500, which happened to be the class size of our high school.
All of you have to, have to, read Paul Graham's Why Nerds Are So Unpopular. You can read it here:
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
My favorite quote:
"Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric."
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