An excerpt reported in Scientific American from a panel discussion on US education moderated by someone from the Wall Street Journal. Doomed from the start.
My comment follows.
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"The most important thing is to bring to K-12 education college graduates who excel in math and sciences," added Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Whereas other countries recruit teachers from the top tier of graduates, he said, "America is recruiting our teachers generally from the bottom third."
Convincing star college scientists to enter the field of K-12 education can be a hard sell, especially when comparing salaries of public school teachers with those elsewhere in the science industry. Universities entice great minds with pay that is more competitive within the field—physicists generally earning more than humanities instructors to reflect jobs outside of the ivory tower. Public schools, however, pay teachers based on seniority and education rather than field.
Aside from upping the competitiveness of science and math teacher salaries, most of the panelists agreed that competition among schools needed to be increased. "Competition is extremely weak with respect to most education contexts," said Christopher Edley, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and former member of the Obama education transition team. He and others noted that schools should be brought into more direct competition with each other (in part by expanding student choices through the creation of charter schools). Advances in science or math education are often not embraced as quickly as those in private industry because schools and instructors have little external incentive to improve their product (other than meeting basic proficiency requirements).
Competition, however, shouldn't entirely overtake the role of regulation, concluded Edley. "This is a huge, huge industry," he said. "Ultimately, you're going to have to use competition to identify the innovations that work, but then… require of low-performing schools that they adopt best practices." The education policy debate, noted Murray, is not unlike that currently taking place over health care: Do you create an environment with forced competition or place more emphasis on regulation?
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The US is a slime of worms when it comes to education. A miniscule elite (artificially fed from other countries) and an overwhelmingly undereducated, falsely educated and just plain uneducated general public. The solutions suggested here will be less than useless.
As long as the goal is a few top brains, the rest of us get nothing. Instead, the States should aim to develop the best possible knowledge and skills at the middle of the Gaussian curve mentioned by Fyngyrs. This would not only give a much broader foundation for the best performers to rise from, but also give underachievers a much more attainable target. It's also a damn sight more democratic. And it requires a completely different focus from the US. One that makes sure that ALL schools regardless of location or intake turn out an equally high standard of "product" - our kids, the next generation. It's been done (in Sweden, for instance) and it can and should be done everywhere. But there's no chance at all of this happening in the US under the tyranny of profit-driven capitalism. It' s not dog-eat-dog competition that's the answer, but supportive emulation.
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