Picking up the merit pay ball from Will for a moment, let’s hash out a few competing ideas. First of all, I think just about everyone agrees on two fundamentals: teachers are probably paid too little, and yet teacher pay in and of itself will not solve the problem with our education system. There are…
Stepping back from the weeds of the merit pay debate, it’s kind of amazing to survey the arguments against compensating teachers based on performance and realize that this stuff literally wouldn’t fly in any other context. Can you imagine an entire industry deciding that its employees aren’t motivated by financial incentives and, as a result,…
I confess I’m somewhat baffled by Dana Goldstein’s beef with merit pay: Forty years of psychological research demonstrates that when someone is faced with a complex, creative task — like teaching — money is an ineffective motivational tool, and may even delay progress. Professionals engaged in creative work are more likely to be motivated by…
One thing I thought about reading this Hot Air post is that if a lot of the proposed health care funds come from state coffers, we run the risk of not being able to fund our education systems year after year, with that money diverted into bloated health care budgets. The worse our children do…
by Mike at the Big Stick I am a conservative, so many of my views on education are, well, conservative. But I’ve also been involved with public education for a long time through my work with various historical sites and museums and the result has been that on some issues I diverge from mainstream conservative…
Via Ta-Nehisi Coates comes this piece by Pat Buchanan that centers around the following allegation: Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving…
E.D. thinks that market economics don’t apply to education. Chris disagrees, but thinks that market economics ultimately are about controlling people and inevitably creates – specifically in the realm of education – a form of corporatism. Chris also explains that this is why he is not a libertarian. I. FREE MARKET ECONOMICS ARE NOT ABOUT…
“[T]he folks at Harvard, Columbia, and Yale, are held accountable by … whom, exactly? Oh, that’s right: they’re accountable to their customers, who by virtue of their participation in a market that – ideally, at least – enables them to choose between different providers are thereby enabled to vote with their feet on the question…
Over at the Daily Dish, Lane Wallace bravely defends the liberal arts (from whom, I wonder – colleges’ burgeoning admissions rolls?), arguing that a humanities degree is somehow necessary to grasp ambiguity and encourage creative thinking. I’m skeptical, but this bit really jumped out at me: In a flash, I grasped the true value of…
So we’ve gone some rounds in the teaching/education debate – with Will, Freddie, John, Conor, Sonny and myself all chiming in to one degree or another – and I’d like to follow up a bit on Will’s post on Michelle Rhee. What I think bothers me often in these schooling debates is that a lot…
“We must create an apocalyptic sense of urgency about Education in this country and then take drastic measures.” ~ Shafeen Charania So as John put it recently, since it “appears to be Say Controversial Things About Public Education Week” I’d like to just discuss what I see as my own ideal system of schools and,…
“So we’re supposed to react to a situation in which our schools are failing and the teachers’ unions are one of the biggest forces standing in the way of commonsensical and much-needed reforms by increasing what we pay our teachers, and … leaving the unions alone.” ~ John Schwenkler, responding to me. John, of course,…
I suspect conservatives will find a lot to like in Geoffrey Canada’s full-spectrum approach to inner-city education.
Conor’s latest posts (here and here) sparked off a pretty decent debate in the comments over at The American Scene, and led to a good follow-up here at the League via Brother Will. Over at TAS you essentially have Conor et al arguing against teachers unions and in favor of performance pay; and you’ve got…
James Poulos points to this Mark C. Taylor op-ed in the NyTimes on ending the university as we know it. The core of Taylor’s counterproposal to the currently balkanized world of graduate education is the following: 1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor…
…is laying off all the school psychologists, school counselors, art teachers, music teachers, theatre teachers, P.E. teachers, and many of its new teachers not out of the “probationary” period yet – a total cut of 30% of school district teaching staff. This is how we will face the coming century – by bailing out our…
Time has a story out today on the 25 best blogs (and 5 most over-rated blogs). No huge surprise, Andrew Sullivan makes the cut. Looks like some good stuff all around – something for everybody – maybe a blog or two you haven’t read yet…probably a lot you have (like TPM, and HuffPo etc.) Here’s…
Yglesias highlights an interesting interview with Jeb Bush on Sweden’s education system, which in short utilizes all sorts of neat ideas like credit-based learning a la four year colleges, and voucher systems that allow for public and private cooperation. Says Bush, “The idea that somehow Sweden would be the land of innovation, where private involvement…
I lived in Vancouver, BC for two years and honeymooned there years later, but the extent of my knowledge in regards to Canada is limited mainly to such trivial (yet ironically important) matters as its rather bad selection of mixed drinks (do Canadians drink anything other than martinis?) and its rather good selection of beer…
You seemed savvier at 12 than most adults.
