Education Pondering

We seem to have a real problem with education in this country. Specifically we seem to have a problem of lots of people saying that there is a problem, then coming up with some complex "solution" that fits in nicely with their point of view. Different methods of teaching, ways to evaluate teachers/schools, charter and/or private schools, vouchers, punishment, reward, ...

There are good and bad teachers. There are good and bad schools. There are good and bad parents. There are easier and harder students.

We can't fix parents. But people love trying to deal with the other three.

Personally, I think that one thing that has been happening over the past few decades is that women have had increasing opportunities outside of schoolhouses. There are still plenty of good teachers, but we tend, as a society, to see teaching as a career of last resort, and we further see teaching as being less...glamorous?...as the students get younger. I'm not sure that we can really offset that, largely because the knowledge/education necessary to teach college is much greater than it is to teach kindergarten.

This isn't to say that teaching college is harder. It requires more knowledge but less patience and less of other things. College instructors don't (need to) care if a student doesn't show up to class or fails a test, or even understands the material. Kindergarten teachers are instrumental in developing not so much knowledge, but behavior. But we tend to compensate people based on their level of education more than their level of skill or talent (pro athletes withstanding). And we tend to see prestige in a profession as parallel to how much people in that profession get paid.

I think my best solution would be to dramatically increase the pay of teachers, say 50% across the board, with special incentives for under-served communities. Yes, that would reward some current teachers that are not as good, but it would mean more coveted positions and more resulting candidate competition going forward.