Slashdot Mirror
X-Prize Founder Wants Ideas For Fixing Education
An anonymous reader writes "X-Prize Founder Peter Diamandis, speaking at SXSW, says he wants to set up a $10 million prize for fixing education — but he needs help figuring out how to target the problem. From the article: 'He said he has considered multiple directions that an Education X Prize could take, such as coming up with better ways to crowd-source education, or rewarding the creation of "powerful, addictive game" that promotes education. But he isn’t sure which way to go. There’s no shortage of high-tech visionaries and tycoons these days, running around with ideas about how to fix education. Many of them are finding, though, that technology alone isn’t enough. Exciting ideas founder quickly if they don’t sustain motivation in students who perform at widely different levels. Other challenges include the need to engage effectively with school districts, teachers and parents.'"
Personally, I think parents and teachers unions are the biggest parts of the problems, or are certainly high on the list.
Easy. Fuck the union. Make it a system where you can get fired if you don't do well. Base pay on performance, not seniority.
What's that you say? Performance evals might not be fair? Welcome to every other business in America. Deal with it. If the manager doesn't give you good evals, find another company (district). If you move from district to district and keep getting crappy evals, guess what? The problem is YOU.
Likewise, if parents hate your school so much that they are willing to drive 2 hours into another district, guess what? Your school should go "bankrupt", just like companies do. Not your fault you say? Tough place to run a school? Good. Find another district.
So the district has no school, or the school always sucks? Guess what. It's not a problem with the administrators OR the teachers. It's your city. It sucks. There could be any number of reasons your fine city has turned into Crackville. Fix that, and the schools will fix themselves.
These are the problems with schools. Everybody knows what has to be done to fix them. The hard part is forcing them to do it.
Why are we trying to innovate to fix education? A quick search indicates we are around 15th in reading and science, worse in math. Doesn't that mean there are 15 countries doing it better which we could try to emulate them rather than spending money trying to create something cool and new?
From the article: 'He said he has considered multiple directions that an Education X Prize could take, such as coming up with better ways to crowd-source education, or rewarding the creation of "powerful, addictive game" that promotes education.
This isn't a game or something that is fixed by simply throwing money at. It is a social problem first and foremost. The culture of this country does not appreciate education, and the idea of studying as hard as South Koreans or Japanese is seen as if it were child abuse or something like that.
But he isn’t sure which way to go.
Look at Japan, South Korean, Germany, Finland. Copy, adapt, rinse and repeat. Moreover, for changes specific to our country, I would suggest the following:
1. Get rid of summer school (or provide vouchers for low-income people to put their kids in summer camps.)
2. From that above, increase the number of school hours during the year, like in Japan or Germany, or like in almost any other country, developed and otherwise.
3. Teach kids to stand up when a teacher enters and leaves a room, and teach them, no, put them to clean their own class rooms as part of their daily school day.
4. Give teachers better pay and better training.
5. Don't pass kids to the next grade unless they have actually demonstrated they are capable off. Enough of giving HS degrees to kids who LITERALLY cannot read or add fractions.
6. De-emphasize 4-year college degrees. Instead, emphasize vocational training at the HS and community college level. That is, implement something akin to that the Germans and Japanese have.
7. Increase the number of commercials that laud education. Increase the number of educational programs (.ie. musicals and documentaries) in TV. Compare the number of educational programs and commercials in Japanese TV to ours, and you'll see the difference.
Do that and in a generation you'll see a change, all without throwing the coffers out of the window and without looking for the next e-silver bullet.
You can throw billions at the problem, but if we don't change our culture and the basic nature of our curricula, it ain't gonna count for shit.
You're going to have to specify what you mean by "unions" being the problem.
Parents can cause problems by not providing a stable home environment and emphasis on learning. Or parents can help by providing those. So "parents" being a "problem" ... again, you have to specify what you mean.
But first off, someone needs to define the "problem".
What, exactly, needs to be improved?
Are there other countries that are doing better?
If so, what are their approaches?
The problem is not that our education system is broken. The problem is that the students don't get the education reinforced outside of school. Either because of their friends, that their parents aren't at home, or their parents just don't care, these students are being told-through words and actions-that they don't need an education, or getting an education is too hard, or that its stupid. They can make more money playing sports, or dealing drugs, or robbing houses, or whatever. They are being told this by their family, their friends, their peers, and their society/culture. It doesn't matter how you change the system, how much money you throw at it, because the problem does not lie within the system. It exists outside of it.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
founder (intransitive verb) , To fail utterly; collapse
What's wrong with that?
The biggest problem I see is the lack of streaming in education. Trying to give everyone the same education is simply stupid. There is no way that you can teach at a level such that the slowest students are keeping up while the top students are stretched - someone, somewhere has to suffer. However the moment you try to stream students there are cries of discrimination and unfairness. Frankly I do not think that education will be fixed until there are governments willing to tackle this politically sensitive issue.
The curious thing is that, somehow, this does not apply to sports. Nobody would think it sensible that footballers, athletes etc. are held back and denied more advanced training because it is discriminatory against those who have less physical ability...but the moment it comes to academics it is a completely different story. I think the key difference is that society can easily see the benefit of a good sports person - they entertain. However the benefit of a good academic - jobs created, industries founded, science discovered etc. - is less clear and being smart is perceived as benefiting the individual only.
So perhaps that X prize should go to the best idea for turning academic subjects into a spectator sport. The moment we have people interested in watching teams of physicists competing there will be no problem in getting a more rigorous education for those who need it.
So if you're in an area where children aren't "performing" due largely to the attitude of their parents, and your performance evaluation is bad, all the teachers should leave and go somewhere else?
What you're saying is that people who live in an area where most parents don't care about their childrens education (even if they themselves DO care about their childrens education) don't deserve to have a school.
Also, it means that a teacher who lives (works) in an area where parents are move involved in their childrens education will have to work "less hard" for a greater pay cheque than a teacher in a "worse" area would.
Not everything should be run like a business.
That's your answer? Ban collective bargaining rights and privatise education? The reasons why that is totally wrong are too numerous to mention. I realise that you are probably from the US where teachers not being fireable is a major problem, and where many schools perform poorly without any consequences. But even if you solved both of those problems, that only gets you on par with the standard school system functioning efficiently, like say in Germany. This is a system that was created over a century ago to create a society of workers to fuel the industrial revolution, which in turn was based on a system for the nobility to educate their children to rule over the peasants. The idea that new ideas are needed and better systems are possible is not restricted to the problems of your local elementary school. This is a worldwide issue and if your society is having problems getting the current system to work, you should be even more in favour of coming up with a new one.
If you're on the high school football team you practice football after school with a coach dedicated to improving your skills.
Where's the after school coach for math? If you have a tutor it is usually to bring you up to the level of the other students. Not to help you become better than the math students in other schools.
Yet someone skilled in moving a ball down a field gets paid a LOT more than someone skilled in math.
Easy. Fuck the union. Make it a system where you can get fired if you don't do well. Base pay on performance, not seniority.
Ok, so how do you want this to be measured? It's easy to scream "performance", but much harder to actually quantify. By student performance on tests? That what we have now, and we have teachers just teaching tests. And what if a teacher's class has a large number of students that are bad test takers? Are they SOL? Observations? Unless you are constantly observing the class, those would be worthless. Student evaluations? If the teacher actually disciplines their students, the students will give them bad reviews because they dont like the teacher. But a teacher that let's the students run the class will get a good eval because the students like him. So if you say performance based, you better have a good system in mind. Otherwise you contribute nothing.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
So X (what is wrong with education here) has not been defined ... ...
Which means that a plan to fix X is sort of impossible at this point
But you've already determined that there needs to be a way of "weeding out the bad teachers" in the plan.
Sounds to me that your REAL goal is "weeding out" some teachers. And then basing a "plan" around that.
How about we stick to finding X first?
What, specifically, is WRONG with education today?
Is any other country doing it better? How?
Before someone mods you down, the head of the Finish education system (rated at the top), completely agrees with you -- they specifically avoid the competition aspects of education:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/
It's about cooperation, not competition. They let the teachers judge the progress, not standardized testing from on-high. There are no private schools. There are no fees for education (other than taxes).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
This isn't a game or something that is fixed by simply throwing money at. It is a social problem first and foremost. The culture of this country does not appreciate education, and the idea of studying as hard as South Koreans or Japanese is seen as if it were child abuse or something like that.
>SNIP<
Do that and in a generation you'll see a change, all without throwing the coffers out of the window and without looking for the next e-silver bullet.
Wow, it's a good thing you're here and reading this! It sounds like you have this all figured out!
Increasing the number of hours, having children stand when the teacher enters and leaves the room, de-emphasizing college in favor of vocational training - all of that makes perfect sense!
It's almost like, dare I say it, you've got the answers in hand! All of your suggestions strike at the very heart of why education sucks in this country - have you contacted Peter yet? You should, you know...
Three things, though.
Firstly, children are naturally learners. Given the chance, they will drink from the fountain of information for as much as they can hold, and then come back for more the next day. Anyone who has raised children knows this - they are insatiably curious and inventive and experimental.
Secondly, learning is inherently fun and rewarding. This is an evolutionary survival trait, and is the reason for point #1 above. It takes a decade or more of forced, spoon-fed boredom before they come to associate learning with pain.
Thirdly, today we know a whole lot more about the psychology and physiology of learning than we did when the school system was first implemented. For example, do you know why the standard courses include trigonometry and not, for example, probability? Trig is important, but Prob is much more useful in daily life.
Your points are just a rehash of the authoritarian view commonly held by the American school system. It amounts to nothing more than insanity: since the techniques aren't working, let's do them even more!
The post, and Peter in particular, is looking for alternatives to the current system, not more of the same. It expresses the opinion that maybe there are ways that are better than what we are using.
More of the same won't solve anything. STFU.
If teachers can teach kids to pass a sufficiently rigorous test, I think we could all be pretty satisfied. The problem is the test, not that performance is linked to testing.
Make the test much, much longer. It should be 4 or 5 days long at the end of each year. Make the tests much more broad as well. Then let the teachers teach to it.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Kids need more financially rewarding (and stable) jobs to aspire to than professional sports player.
My first suggestion would be to go back over the work of those who have studied this problem in depth. Recommended reading: Maria Montessori, Ivan Illich, Rudolph Steiner (That last one is a bit fruity but there are still some interesting ideas in it).
Having done that myself to a limited degree, I can identify numerous areas where improvement is possible. Firstly I think the concept that you learn X at age Y should be ditched. If you don't know how to read at age 5Y you should still be able to use the standard education system, as most information in modern society is less prevalent than reading, and there should be nothing stopping me from learning high school geography for example at 29, and nothing forcing me to learn it at 16. Which brings me to the second area, and in my mind the most important: No one should be forced to learn anything, learning should be self directed and interest based. This is where people often jump down my throat and say 'that would never work'. Ivan Illich has many strong arguments for this idea, but I usually go the route of disputing the objections. Axioms: people dont like learning, learning is necessary. Therfore: people must be forced to learn. The problem is axiom 1. People love learning, all animals do, it is called play. This is an artificial distinction in my opinion as play and education were basically synonymous for millions of years, until the education system was invented. If you take an average child before school age, they are generally full of question, always exploring and testing. Then you send them to school. Let's just say that it is not inconceivable that with a better education system people might enjoy learning. They might continue to learn throughout life and without the need for government funding or attendance legislation. The goal of learning should be to teach the value of learning. Another area that could be improved, and the primary one being discussed by other posts in this thread, is the relationship between teachers and education, in that it is clearly dysfunctional in the current system. All of us at one time or another have had teachers that made us worse at the subject they taught. This is not the teachers' fault alone, there are circumstances such as their own education, their working conditions, the attitudes of parents, students and other staff, personal life, health, etc. This is a failure of the system. The avenue I would pursue in rectifying this would be to look at reducing the role of teachers in the system. I am not suggesting their replacement by technology, whilst this seems attractive on the surface, it is severely limited and could even be counter-productive in many cases. I would look more in the direction of students teaching each other. Developing networks of people with similar interests and levels of understanding, and moving the role of teacher to a more passive one. Teachers should be there to oversee the learning, and make sure the correct teaching is being presented and that misconceptions/mistakes don't get caught up in the program. They should also be there as an expert, to demonstrate procedures and answer questions. The idea that the teacher has to regulate every step of the learning process is one of the reasons their role is currently not working. There are many more areas that need work and new ideas, but this is a post on slashdot, not a novel. Oh and Please don't go the addictive games route. If a game has to be addictive to get played then it has no value, if it had value it would not need to be addictive. Games as education is a great idea in general, just remove the word addictive from the sentence.
With free school choice I don't see what the problem is with standardized testing, the testing just sets a minimum standard ... if the tests and benchmarks are well designed I don't see a problem with standardized testing (poor performing schools should get extra funding to start with and help to get up to scratch, and their benchmarks should be weighted based on the academic aptitude of entering students etc). Let the parents decide what they want on top of the minimum.
Even teaching to the test is not a problem with well written test, if the best way to do well on an unknown test is to know the curriculum then teaching to the test is simply teaching the curriculum ...
Meh, I think it's far more damaging to (A) think a school is a business or (B) pay teachers less than any other degree-requiring profession.
The day that a stellar teacher's pay exceeds other professions, you get to talk about how teachers have become too powerful. Until then, engineers and lawyers and doctors and politicians get zero sympathy from me when they rant about invented horrors involving teachers unionizing.
Personally, I also know that opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one, taint nothin' special about yours.
--
(That taint pun was a freebie, BTW. Froth up some lube and a bit of fecal matter and you've got a Santorum.)
There is an earlier /. article today on a new way to think about learning.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/03/11/1927219/a-better-way-to-program
It would be great if there were interactive educational applications like the ones
that Bret Victor talks about.
This article is also very interesting. http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/ It points out that, when we learn we need to focus more on recalling the information. Sites like khanacademy present the information in small chunks that are easy to understand but if the student doesn't practice recalling the information, then she/he is at a disadvantage.
Finally, there is this video by Sir Ken Robinson which talks about the issues pretty well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=player_embedded#!
one of my friends runs the premier english school in taipei and what his philosophy in schooling isn't just educating the students, its educating the parents. he literally has classes that the parents are forced to go to where he teaches them how to parent their children because the majority of parents don't know how to do it right. and his method has been successful. he consistently produces children that score highest in the country and make it into the ivy league schools back here in the states.
I find it amazing that Khan Academy has only been mentioned twice, once dismissively. The idea of flipping the classroom is a paradigm shift and puts more responsibility on the parent(s) to ensure their child is taking their lessons.
Problem is ignorant people make bad decisions about things they know nothing about. Politicians generally know nothing of what they talk about and sell people on things they know nothing about.
Everybody seems to think they are a dentist because they had fillings. Education should be the same way and in addition the education experts vastly more difficult profession than some mouth mechanic.
If you want to fix education in the USA the 1st thing you can do is remove political involvement in "fixing" the system. That will not happen because Americans love to shift responsibility from the top on down to the citizens themselves, especially the parents-- their brats can do no wrong and nothing is their parenting! I know teachers, the previous generation was a lot closer to "how hard should I hit my child for misbehaving?" and the next generation was "my little johnny says you are a bad teacher, why can't you teach him?". As the USA goes down the drain even more desperation and blame shifting will happen along with more panic.
Another factor is that the USA thinks it is on the top of the world and their limited world view is WAY behind reality and its not surprising since the general perceptions are about a generation behind. The world education rates have gone up worldwide by huge amounts with many nations on par with the USA that were previously way behind. There is a LIMIT to what can be achieved (and measured) so as everybody progresses the gap between the top and majority gets smaller-- the benefits of being ahead become smaller-- even if your nation is at the TOP the whole time the difference becomes negligible so who is on top then no longer matters as it once did. The great benefits of education the USA had is being minimized as others continue to progress forward; therefore, to some degree a relative judgement error is highly likely.
Plus there is the misconception that education == job. There is a job problem and it will be getting worse people are looking for scapegoats and excuses and education is going to be put under more pressure to be a simple job training program; career is not important if you just need a job and there are not enough to go around.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I'm reminded of the adage about horses, water and drinking. The amount of effort today's students are willing to put forth is pretty amazingly low. That's more or less because even with a low level of effort (and correspondingly low performance) they're in no danger of: 1) being kicked out of school, 2) being held back a grade, or 3) being routed onto a "non-college" track. You're left with self-motivation (which is semi-rare) and external consequences assigned by parents. Only many parents opt out, so often you don't even have that. Most recommendations for "fixing" education deal with tweaking "the water" in the horse analogy so that it's somehow more nourishing. The best, most effective water in the world isn't worth much, though, when the horse won't drink.
The Neatherlands already fixed education. All you do is ban private schools and require all schools receive equal funding proportionate to their student body. When the rich kids have to go to the same quality of school as the poor kids, well what do you know? The schools get better. It's not rocket surgery.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
As a math teacher, I'm tired of every Joe Millionaire stepping up and saying that education needs to be fixed. Education isn't the problem. For the millionaires who don't understand yet...public education is not about raising test scores. Public education is about civilizing our citizens. Without public education, the public will not understand civility en mass. As a teacher in a high-poverty rural school district, and I've seen how uncivil kids and adults can be even when they're educated. If we don't force parents to educate their kids, they'll run free, they'll run wild, and they'll be a plague on our populace.
That being said, if you want to raise test scores, there is one variable that has more correlation than all the others combined. Poverty. And I have the numbers to back it up. Using my home state of Minnesota as an example, look at the state test results hosted by the Star Tribune. Run a correlation study between percent proficiency on either test, and the % of test takers that are low-income. (Remove the districts w/ the small samples of less than 10 -- they're specialized cooperatives & magnet schools whose sample of students taking the test do not follow the same sampling as with general Independent School Districts.) Even better, run it on just the Minneapolis / St. Paul Metro Area districts.
I haven't calculated the results for 2011 yet, but I ran it for 2010 in the metro area. Metro-wide, the correlation coefficient between % proficient and low-income for math was -0.91 and -0.93 for reading. That's insane. You almost never get correlation coefficients that good anywhere in statistics, but it's happening here. Forget teachers. Forget schools. The single biggest factor impacting education is poverty and low-income. (And for those who want to chant, "correlation is not causation," I challenge you to walk into any inner-city school district and witness the behavior yourself. I promise you, there's more than just correlation there.)
If millionaires really wanted to fix schools, they'd have a much greater impact on education (and our society at large) if they gave away their money to the poor. Better yet, set up a stipend program like Brazil and other countries have.
Forget the misguided idea that everyone is "equal" no matter their IQ or the effort they put in. "Leave" freeloaders "behind", as it were. Segregate schools into "gifted" and "not", make transition possible for those who want to get to the "gifted" track. Make the "gifted" track hard, but interesting. Sorry, kids, if you don't perform, back to the "crappy" school you go. Put the bar for "gifted" school above the internationally accepted standard, don't admit everyone. Adjust the split of resources between "gifted" and "crappy" track in accordance with the number of kids in each.
Right now the situation is absurd. My second grader is two years ahead of everyone else in his class academically (it remains to be seen if he's gifted or not, he's quite lazy), yet he can't get into a "gifted" program because spots are allocated by (wait for it...) lottery. This is his first year in public school, and probably the last. He will go to a hardcore private school starting next year, and I'll be shelling out something like 20K/year to keep him there. I find it rather unfortunate that smart kids from low income families will not be able to realize their potential. I also find it unfortunate that I'm paying real estate taxes for the shitty schools that don't teach kids anything, and have no real means to change the situation.
I'll single out one facet of education, and that is mathematics. The pinnacle of pre-college math study is calculus. Arthur Benjamin(of Mathemagics fame) in my view has a simple solution for math education in school. Rather than making calculus the pinnacle, you make statistics the pinnacle. These days I feel that school doesn't teach what regular people need for life skills. We use statistics and probability every day in one form or another. Arthur Benjamin gave his talk about this at a TED convention, and it can be found here: ere http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_does_mathemagic.html . I think if people start breaking down education into core areas and start finding solutions to more specific problems that plague educational system. Art has a simple, but good idea.
Quantum mechanics, special relativity and general relativity are all very hard to learn, in part because they are so counterintuitive. Imagine a computer game which throws you into a universe where SR (or quantum mechanics or GR) have large, easily measurable effects - e.g. the speed of light is about 50m/s. After you've spent enough time zipping around on your relativistic motorcycle shooting zombies (or whatever), you should be able to intuitively understand SR, and the mathematics will become easy. (Well, as easy as Newtonian physics, anyhow.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
18,000 per pupil per year in NJ, 14 student to teacher ratio = $252,000 each teacher brings in. Avg salary, 55,000. What kind of insane overhead costs are those. And these schools are all in the red anyway. Allow charter schools and I'm sure we'll get some great education considering how much we are spending already.
i'm not sure if you're just being a troll or just really stubborn... but isn't it obvious what the problem is? the education our children are getting is substandard, especially when compared to numerous other countries. i don't think anyone bothered "identifying" it to you because it was so obvious, we just assumed you'd know what we're talking about here.
as for the business analogy, you totally missed the point. yes, bankruptcy and not being profitable might be the problem, but firing someone won't solve it. there are so many possibilities and likely many reasons why the business is failing. firing the bad apples is just one part of the solution. just like firing the bad teachers is also just one part of the solution to our problem. there are numerous other problems, however. for instance...
and i didn't even get into the politics of the education system. i'm not well enough informed about that to speak authoritatively but my friends that are teachers tell me how screwed up it is all the time.
you need people that can afford to teach. Teachers love teaching. They'll give up a lot for it. But there are limits. In many places teachers are paid so little they can't survive as teachers. This has been the case since the 50s, but for a long time the bulk of teachers were woman and retires. The husbands brought home enough money that their wives could afford to earn less, and the retirees had pensions. As a result we had a pool of highly skilled teachers working for much less than a living wage. As real wages declined in the 70s this wasn't true anymore. People couldn't afford to retire. Woman needed more money to keep the family afloat. Teachers began to want a living wage, which raised the cost of education. We could do without the incentives if we just had an economic base that allowed people to teach.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Based on the existing state of the tobacco market, it isn't obvious that the pot would start being any more offshore than it presently is.
I assume you'd have yuppie pot, that you have to go to farmers' markets to get, tended with love by authentic hippies. Below that you'd have Whole Foods pot, given something reasonably approaching the tending of yuppie pot, albeit on a contemporary agrobusiness scale.
Below that you'd have your basic convenience store brands, put together out what whatever mixture of canadian, american, and mexican happens to be cheap and reasonably consistent.
If I am not wrong, the one reason we want our children to be educated is to encourage them to think
But ... If the only reason in sending a child to school is to enable him to "find a job", then we might as well get rid of all the school and send that kid to work in the factory straight-away !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I used to teach undergraduates when I was doing my PhD and this is what I saw, from both being a student, and being an instructor
The whole thing about education has failed miserably
In many schools (from Primary School to High School to University), the curriculum was essentially "copied" from each others
Essentially, everybody has been copying curriculum from everybody else
Like in math --- Why in hell they make calculus a mandatory subject for students who are interested in mathematics ?
Students would surely benefit more from learning statistics than they would from calculus
Look around if you don't believe me --- how many universities put more emphasis on statistics than on calculus ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The first step in solving the "education problem" is to realize that there are no simple answers to solving the "education problem". If anybody claims they have a simple solution, they are probably trying to sell something. The problems of education go back many centuries. Plutarch, 2000 years ago said that "a mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled". Aristotle said that "the purpose of education is to teach us to love beauty". Our addiction to simple ideological solutions to our problems is I believe at the heart of much of our modern malaise.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Every successful western nation disagrees with you. How does that make you feel? Perhaps you should move to a place where you can live freely off the land as king libertarian on libertarian island.
Actually I've got to agree with the GP. First you've got to identify the problem. Yes bad teachers may be part of the problem, but they may be a miniscule and insignificant part of the problem. Getting the power to fire teachers may cause more problems than it solves, by lowering the expectations of teachers in not treating them like professionals, leading to an environment where those who are professional get offended and find something else to do.
What could be more important than firing bad teachers? You have a substantial portion of the USA population who think that having an education makes you an elitist and an untrustworthy bad person. You have a substantial portion of the population who, due to fundamentalist religious teachings, want to stop the teaching of established scientific thought (evolution, sexual education) because it conflicts with their unsupported biases. Bad teachers may factor in, but they are also an easy scapegoat for a segment of the population that doesn't want to admit that they are a major part of the problem. It's a lot harder to teach effectively when you're dealing with a substantial portion of your student base with a hostile attitude fostered at home.
Maybe strong unions generally coincide with higher scholastic achievement because they both arise from more widespread enlightened attitudes about the value of education and human dignity.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The number is completely fabricated.
Take off every 'sig' !!