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posted by dennisn on November 3rd, 2007 at 7:36PM
The problem is with "public" education -- better termed, government-forced education; more specifically, the lack of marketplace competition among teachers -- students don't get to choose the best teachers, and thus weed out the incompetent ones. Over time, just by the nature of the system, bad teachers predominate.
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posted by Nylorac on November 4th, 2007 at 9:10AM
Although I firmly agree that the system errs, I think there isn't enough emphasis on the role of parents within the public educational system. Bad study habits can't entirely be the system's fault, can they?
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posted by dennisn on November 4th, 2007 at 10:43PM
I believe it has been statistically proven that parents don't matter much during the course of a child's formative years -- what does matter is genetics ("hereditary intelligence"); but good or bad parenting plays a relatively inconsequential role.
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posted by dsk on November 5th, 2007 at 9:39AM
>I believe it has been statistically proven that parents don't matter much during the course of a child's formative years
I think you got that screwed up. Here's a relevant quote from 'Freakonomics':
But this is not to say that parents don't matter. Plainly they matter a great deal. Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago--who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed.
I'm sure genetics plays a role, but its not the whole story.
By the time the adopted children became adults, they had veered sharply from the destiny that IQ alone might have predicted. Compared to similar children who were not put up for adoption, the adoptees were far more likely to attend college, to have a well-paid job, and to wait until they were out of their teens before getting married. It was the influence of the adoptive parents, Sacerdote concluded, that made the difference.
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Touché. by dennisn on November 5th, 2007 at 10:25AM.
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posted by Nylorac on November 5th, 2007 at 8:34AM
Yeah, that sounds familiar. I think that in some former post.
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posted by rick on November 4th, 2007 at 1:54AM
Or teachers don't get paid very much, so the good ones go to research and other professions. (From what I've heard from people who know teachers.)
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asfposted by dsk on November 4th, 2007 at 9:49AM
>Or teachers don't get paid very much, so the good ones go to research and other professions. (From what I've heard from people who know teachers.)
I agree to a certain point. If the entire problem was money, we'd have solve this a long time ago. Thing is, high salary incentives only work in conjunction with being able to weed out bad and mediocre teachers. As it stands in Ontario, you work for two years and you essentially get tenure - at the university level, a professor really needs to work his butt off for many years (or become a world-renowned expert in his field) in order to get that kind of job security. So a wage boost now would do nothing but further reinforce the broken system.
Looking at it another way - a higher salary, in addition to attracting higher caliber workers, would also attract much more mediocre workers - so its vital that competence should be a criteria for continuing employment.
I'm with Dennis - the free market is pretty much the only way to guarantee high caliber teachers in the education system. This is not feasible in the current climate, so we should foster competition within the public sphere (via a voucher system or charter schools). The effect would be three-fold:
1) As I said, it would foster competition amongst schools
2) Competition would then necessitate firing bad teachers
3) It would break the union stranglehold on education. As it stands, we've given the teachers' union a monopoly on education, which gives them huge bargaining power - which they have abused to boost their salaries and protect their membership. If a guy like Seleika(sp?) made it through an entire career without getting his ass fired for incompetence there is a problem.
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