[another_story]

There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long.

As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged.

One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility.

All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.

[wrp]

> The culture in America doesn't respect...educators in the way it used to.

Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.

[SteveGerencser]

There is a better, older, phrase that would be great to promote over that tired saying:

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” — Aristotle

[ecshafer]

My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each years final tests and give the family money. The entire society will change overnight, as people will suddenly be asking kids why they aren’t studying.

[cjohnson318]

I think we tried that in the form of scholarships. Basically, the students with the highest grades get discounts from different colleges. It's not exactly the same, but the effect is similar, and this system has been running for generations.

I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. Parents who earn less usually don't have time to help kids with their school work, or don't understand the school work, or don't know how to study or teach children. Sure, there's exceptions to this everywhere, but that's the general pattern.

Incidentally, Louisiana has/had a program called TOPs that covers in-state tuition for students that get over a 3.something GPA. Who benefits the most from it? Kids whose families make above the median income in the state.

I don't think giving X dollars to the families with the top ranking students would change society overnight.

[twothamendment]

My son struggled to read when he was young. Over the summer we set a goal and attached a payout to it. Yes, I bribed my son to read. The problem is now I can't get him to stop.

Money talks.

[seanmcdirmid]

If we did that, the money would mostly go to the well off already. They’ve already got a system in place, they are already deeply into what their kids are studying. It doesn’t sound like much would improve.

[SoftTalker]

This is how I finally memorized my multiplication tables in elementary school. My father paid me. He made me a set of flash cards and had a schedule of credits for each fact learned but I did not get the payout until I learned them all flawlessly.

[gretch]

This Ted talk (includes a lot of data) shows that motivation via money hurts creative problem solving.

https://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y

[mkl]

Sounds like an excuse for parents to make their kids' lives hell. Such a policy would do a lot of damage.

[nebula8804]

>All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to.

Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc.

How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.

[jfdbcv]

Because the top end of US education is still very strong, with some of the best colleges in the world.

Strong capital markets makes the US probably the easiest place to start a company and seek funding.

The US remains a place where smart, talented individuals can succeed and make far more money than peers, attracting a pool of very talented immigrants.

[danaris]

First of all, it's important to define what we mean by "innovation".

Is cryptocurrency "innovation"? Credit-default swaps? Leveraged buyouts? So much of what's been making absurd amounts of money in recent decades—and which gets openly called "innovative" by many people—is not better ways of doing things for people, but simply better ways of separating people from their money.

Second of all, it's important to look at who, exactly, is doing the hard work on the innovations that are pushing us forward, rather than simply making rich people richer. How many of these innovations come from people who got their education 15, 25, 40 years ago?

Third of all, it's important to question the very premise: I'm absolutely in agreement that there is a strong thread of anti-intellectualism in American culture, and that there have been changes in our public school system that have caused some serious problems over the past few decades...but to what extent are these problems universal? To what extent do they actually leave graduates less well prepared to be innovative?

Indeed, to what extent is innovation even a product of education, rather than culture and creativity?

[ithkuil]

I work for an American company remotely from Europe. I didn't leverage any educational facility from the US yet I'm contributing to the fact that the US is "leading the way" in technology. And the reason is simple: not only do they pay me more than an equivalent European company, often it's hard to find an "equivalent" European company where I can work on something I find interesting.

Now, something did originally created the conditions for why US is leading, but once that has happened it can become a self sustaining network effect, provided enough money is kept flowing

[Xcelerate]

> How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output (its people) is in such dire straights?

That's because it's not the people educated by the U.S. systems that are producing so much. I worked at a FANG company and within my team of 50 engineers, I was one of two people who were born in the U.S. It's not just tech either — my father is a chemical engineer and most of the engineers he works with are from other countries.

The U.S. is currently still one of the top places that the world's best talent wants to move to; whether that continues to hold true remains to be seen.

[datavirtue]

Yes. The population drop alone is going to make all this happen. Nevermind the massive black hole of citizenry who know next to nothing and are proud of it.

[WalterBright]

The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.

[wrp]

While I'm not completely against performance-based pay, there are some issues that would make this particular approach unworkable.

One is that in dealing with children, personal compatibility matters a great deal more. Some teacher-student relationships will "just click" and others fail.

Another is the dependence of the students' performance on their home environment.

So, even an excellent teacher will get poor results when working in a disadvantaged district. These things would have to be taken into account when designing a reward system for teachers.

[ordersofmag]

Can you offer any evidence or reasoning as to why I should believe this? It would seem to assert that somehow student success/failure currently sits entirely in the hands of teachers: they know what is needed and could do it if only they were marginally more motivated. I'm not a teacher myself but have been involved in the system my entire life and this doesn't ring true at all. Even if it were possible it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling. Which seems to run counter to the goals of public education.

[waterhouse]

One way to achieve that, for a teacher, would be to get all the good students into your class, and avoid having any bad students, or find reasons to kick them out. Do you have countermeasures for that?

[bandrami]

I find it weird the intensity with which people believe that teachers rather than students are the bottleneck here. If you want to add an incentive it makes much more sense to incent the students to do well.

[light_hue_1]

> The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.

You're talking as if this isn't how the system works today. Your proposal is literally how US education has worked since the 80s. The disaster you see in the public education system in the US is in part caused by merit-based systems including merit-based pay for teachers.

The key problem is that we cannot measure how educated someone is. We can only measure their results on a test. Garbage in, garbage out.

This means that everyone teaches to a test. That's a horrible experience for teachers and students. And it literally leads to the solution the article warns us about: water down all the tests and eliminate as much knowledge from the curriculum as you can so that everyone excels and everyone gets their merit-based pay.

We also know that merit-based pay has a tiny impact on student scores in the short term at the scale that one teacher can control over a student-year, under 0.1 standard deviations. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283122090558...

So not only does merit-based pay for teachers not work, not only does it not raise scores in any meaningful way, not only does it erode the curriculum, it's literally a big part of the current problem in the US.

Oh, and let's not forget kids with any kind of disability. Under this system they become a massive liability. Instead of teachers trying to help such students, they're quickly routed to the closest holding area so that they don't affect scores. This has been going on for almost 20 years now because of No Child Left Behind.

This is why teachers are opposed to the idea of doubling down on merit-based pay. It's not because the best teachers don't want to make more money. It's because it only rewards the teachers of kids that are already performing well, while punishing teachers in schools that aren't performing well, without any means for the teachers to meaningfully intervene.

[donw]

I don't think that would make a difference.

Incentives are whack across the board in education.

At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself.

We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that looks like in-practice.

[SoftTalker]

I think that could work but you would need to give teachers more control over the discipline and syllabus in their classrooms.

If you can't maintain order and can't adapt your teaching to meet the needs of your students, there's limits to what can be achieved.

[fn-mote]

These suggestions of "pay for results" have a complicated history. I suggest anyone interested actually search the literature on it.

Ever since I saw the critique of the 2012 NYC value added measure results, which shows VAM scores uncorrelated between different classrooms of the same teacher [4], I have been very skeptical that any kind of incentive pay will work. (Also, this NYT article is pretty damning considering the source. [3])

The question is not whether VAM can work, it is a question of does a particular implementation work. The paper [1] is a classic (search for it).

In this particular case: the exact method is not clear but it sounds like there is no adjustment for prior achievement, so all teachers of advanced classes will automatically get the bonus? What if instead what is being measured is the change from year to year? Same result: in this case history is an excellent predictor of the future.

[1]: Rothstein, Jesse. “Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 1, February 2010, pp. 175–214.

[2]: Methodological issues in value-added modeling. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-019-09303-w

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality... (paywall)

[4]: https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-re... (Found it!!)

[slowmovintarget]

We have already seen that such incentives produce the wrong effect. At the whole-school level, what we see from incentives like this is that the system gets gamed such that the standard is lowered so that pay milestones are achieved, as opposed to the actual results of educating the children.

Tests get dumbed down. Teaching to tests instead of to understanding occurs.

Pay teachers more, but put them in a system where the students matter, not the money.

[TheCoelacanth]

That seems like more of an incentive to get a job at an already high-performing school than it is to do a better job of teaching.

[coconuthacker42]

And when you suggest that maybe the distance between those making the decision and those on the ground shouldnt be too large, and maybe those on the ground are allowed to take decisions on their own, youd be branded a commie :/