Why haven't schools adopted the business model of "hiring great people and letting them do what they do best"? Pay them well, give them support, infrastructure, and enough oversight to help them resolve their issues quickly and effectively...and then just trust them to be productive and successful.
Is it a lack of funding that stops this from being a reality? A lack of qualified applicants? Is there a good reason this model wouldn't work?
It works quite well in other countries (for instance, Finland). We have a few problems in the US:
-- no profit in it (as observed above)
-- we don't really respect teachers or education in the US
-- school boards and local politicians want control over curricula and political agendas. Can you imagine some bright amazing young teacher teaching unadulterated evolution in some counties in Texas?
Kids are seen as a cost, not an asset or an investment, and we like to cut costs. And I do think there are broad swathes of the political establishment that are really invested in keeping America dumb.
> we don't really respect teachers or education in the US
That's probably the most important answer right there. If teachers had the same, or even higher, status in society as doctors and lawyers (had just as many tv-series where they were superstars etc.) we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
The same issues with measuring performance exists in those other jobs as well, but the perspective on teaching is always from the top. Everone's an expert in a way that's not true for law and medicine (to carry on the metaphor above).
>And I do think there are broad swathes of the political establishment that are really invested in keeping America dumb.
To me this sounds as crazy as thinking that the US government knew about 9/11. Unless your under living under extraordinary circumstances (a disease bankrupting you, etc) nothing can stop you from learning. People choose how they spend their free time if they choose to watch TV instead of learning, it's their own choice not some mandate from the establishment.
Elizabeth Green , in her book[1] claims that this whole debate regarding teacher evaluation, free markets VS teacher autonomy is wrong. The answer lies in better teacher training. [2] Is an interesting article about that, which shows what can be done and how does it work when you offer better teacher training.
Herein lies the problem. People in control of the system are afraid to trust. It's a tradeoff for them, and they choose heavily standarized education that delivers mediocre but predictable and consistent results over an education that could deliver significantly better results but is much harder to quantify. They also get measured and promoted based on some performance metrics , so it's not surprising that they decided to screw up the system to make it more quantifiable.
Schools have a fixed level of funding. If employees do an amazing job it does not increase revenue. I.e it's not a business. How many great peopke do you know that will take 60k a year in salary?
... with too many students, more each year, and ridiculous amounts of homework assigned, so much that there's no way a teacher can even look at it all (on your own time at night) much less evaluate it, ...
There is at least a solution to that one, stop assigning homework. It has no positive effects before middle school that anyone has been able to find.
Are we wasting our children's time by giving them more homework?
Ozkan Erena, Daniel J. Henderson
Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of homework, we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and history are shown to have little to no impact on their respective test scores.
How do you hire great people? Seriously. This is a perennial topic here at HN, and we don't have good answers. We know that interviews don't work. We know that tests can help weed out the truly unqualified, but can't reliably identify great candidates. Ultimately, we mostly fall back to "hire quickly, fire quickly."
And now we're right back to evaluating performance and firing.
This. Think about how hard it is to figure out who is going to be a good developer, and then think about how much harder it is to figure out who is going to be a good teacher.
Why not simply put them in a classroom and watch them teach? Give them a day of lecturing to (existing) classes on whatever topic they want (or you can pick the topic). The incumbent teacher can observe and comment. Or you could hire them on a trial basis (one year) with oversight. There aren't any trade secrets to hide here.
Often they are on a probationary hire arrangement.
When I was in college, I knew of only one person who was competent in our mathematics classes whose aim was to be a HS teacher.
For many, teaching is a career they fall into. When a couple starts a family, for instance, one of the spouses will seek a job in teaching so that his or her hours will eventually be aligned with their children's.
I know very few successful engineers or journalists (etc.) who switch to a career in teaching. Those folks teach night school at the local college.
Maybe if we made teachers, full-time, year-round professionals? I know administrators are, but I'm talking about the people who are actually in the classroom. Summers can be spent improving instruction, maybe in a collaborative session with other teachers.
I don't see what this has to do with the hiring process, but in response I can say that you're speaking to an institutional difference. At my undergraduate institution most of the mathematics majors aimed to be middle or high school teachers (and now are), and their education was supposedly geared toward that. I say supposedly because the "education track" had lower standards and easier requirements than the other tracks (applied and pure math). So they might not be the same people you call "competent."
Moreover, most of the professors at my institution came from industry. They also did not originally aim for teaching, but switched into it. Many of them happen to have a PhD, but there is no research at my college (it's a polytechnic institute). If high school teachers had the same level of respect and comparable pay (and were similarly sought after), I see no reason why this couldn't also occur in high schools. We do, after all, see so many articles on HN about how there aren't enough jobs for our graduates.
Then I think we agree on what the solution may be- getting the same level of professional respect. I think one way to do this is to make it a full-time, year-round profession.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid that this might severely cripple the people who entered the profession because of its' family-friendly schedule.
I'm glad to hear that most of the mathematics majors at your undergrad institution were intending to be teachers. That gives me some hope.
[Specifically, I was responding to the 'hire for one year with oversight' bit.]
I see a cultural basis for some of the problem. Money is a huge factor. But if you are going to give more money, you're going to want to demand more. Some of the teachers in place now aren't particularly competent. By making it a more demanding profession perhaps we can get more people who want to do it for love of a subject rather than convenient hours.
Because there's no way to weed out under performers, the teachers unions block every attempt at doing so. So the system must be highly regulated and inspected to limit the damage that bad teachers can do. The weird thing is, good teachers are happy to be shackled to the same system, collective pay bargaining etc.
If bad teachers could be fired! then the money spent on inspections would easily cover better pay for the good ones. But the unions must be smashed first.
This is an argument often used by teachers to shut down debate, but what you forget is we have all been to school. We know what goes on first hand, everyone does.
So I hear teachers whine about their long hours, but I remember perfectly well that "teaching" consists of putting a video on then going outside for a smoke. For the same pay as the guy who actually does a lesson.
And this is why charter schools are such a sterling success? This is why West European schools are uniformly catastrophic wastelands compared to ours? -- This experiment has already been run repeatedly, there is nothing in it at all.
A) There is a finite supply of great teachers. Only tele-teaching technology might allow great teachers reach every student
B) Letting great teachers do their thing would require the government to voluntarily give a large group of people autonomy (which is why many great teachers elect to take a lower salary at a private school, where they have more latitude)
How much should they get paid?
Who are these great people and where do I find them?
How much oversight should they be given without restricting them?
How much should I trust the teacher vs a few vocal parents? Vs the silent majority?
The reason why your model wouldn't work is that nothing concrete was stated.
The problems of inner city schools go beyond the education system. It's like trying to fix Iraq by sending more doctors - it does little to address the root cause.
Is it a lack of funding that stops this from being a reality? A lack of qualified applicants? Is there a good reason this model wouldn't work?