An urban teacher corps — paid more, fired easily and assigned to high-need schools — would make teaching a “prestige profession,” writes Ezra Klein in The American Prospect.
Won’t work, responds Matt Yglesias of The Atlantic. There are too many teachers.
. . . (We need) systems and curricula that can work when implemented by what amounts to a mass labor force of teachers. It’s misleading to look at smallish programs like Teach for America and then start dreaming of what things might be like if that experience could be universalized — it just can’t be.
I agree. We’ll never hire enough super-smart teachers to make a difference; we can make it easier for normal-smart people to teach effectively. Good working conditions — the chance to teach in an orderly school where the principal leads, teachers collaborate and students learn — will attract and retain competent teachers without demanding an unsustainable level of idealism or brilliance. Eventually, we’ll find a way to pay more to teachers who do more, but I think improving working conditions is more important than improving pay.
An urban teacher corps — paid more
I’m just shaking my head here. We pay about $10k for 9 months to educate a child already; include capital project, it can get much higher.
Sooner or later, we are going to bump up against a GDP problem - we can only allocate so much of our national income to education before something has to give.
The first key to crafting a system in which people of normal smarts can teach is getting rid of differentiation. It takes a heck of a lot more smarts for a teacher to teach to a classroom of wide ability than it does to a classroom of narrow ability. It’s quite simply over the head of most people of average intelligence to teach three or four differentiated lessons at a time. When we ask them to do so, some of the room gets ignored.