Blessings,
Emily

Well unfortunately, this isn’t the answer. Not least because it’s just never going to happen. What we really need is election reform. Getting rid of the Electoral College is the big, obvious one. But I’d also love to see us implement something like Condorcet Voting. If we’re convinced that people are too stupid/lazy for that (hint: they’re not, actually, but it’s an easy argument to make) I’d be perfectly happy with Approval Voting. It’s not perfect, but it’s a fine alternative, and leagues better than what we have now. Then there wouldn’t be a need for silly primaries, where candidates have to tack to the left or right, depending on their party, followed by an immediate dive back to the center for the general election. We’d be able to plausibly choose between more than two people, and do so without potentially throwing the election to a less desirable option because you wanted to vote third party (e.g. Nader in 2000, Perot in ’92 and ’96).

Education is presently undergoing a paradigmatic change because humanity is, and that is why.

What do I mean by that? Well, look around you and you will see … and it will register with you that, yes, it actually IS happening around you because YOU are the one willing it to be so.

See where ICT is going with freeware and community building? See how fed-up you are getting with hollow politics, shaky economics, ineffective law and order and bad, really bad schooling that we dare call “education”?

Planetary resources are going to hell, the great poor-rich divide is getting bigger and … Well, it’s all changing, thanks to you and your precious neighbor – all of them.

You may presently only be vaguely aware of it, but you can consciously assist the change and be of even greater help.

Just look at whatever your eye catches again, and then over gain until you see budding life there. Right there. And soon you will begin to see it everywhere. Yes, and within you. Specifically within you for that is where Life originates.

I thank and salute you for your most unique and valuable contribution to get us all out of the box – the cold casket of despondency.

We also aren’t going to get free health care even though every other first world country has it. We didn’t see any second thoughts on corporate welfare bailouts. And we aren’t seeing an end to our wars and illegal prisons.

Heck this congress is not even in favor gun control. Obama winning will have a wonderful impact on civil rights, but I’m afraid we won’t be getting much else from these “democrats”

When your tired of choosing between the conservative party and the really conservative party, you should support Ralph Nader. He’s got a great blog: http://www.nader.org/

Even as the most important thing, though, that doesn’t mean you can throw everything else against them and still expect them to come out on top. Say all the factors are the same except the mediocre teacher from your example has a class of 15 students, and the great teacher has 25. Might the great teacher be able to overcome that and do a better job? Sure. Might they be able to overcome having a less well-equipped classroom? Definitely. Might they be able to overcome both of those at once? Maybe not. I dunno, I just don’t think that part of the speech was bad. I’d be much more inclined to get on him for negative feedback loop of poor schools don’t win as much funding, which means they do poorly, which means they don’t win as much funding, which means they do poorly, etc.

As far as the merit-based pay, I’m absolutely with you on those concerns, which I why I present it with such a strong caveat. Maybe we can’t make it work in a way that isn’t damaging. I think we can, if we value the input of the people it will affect. But I guess it’s more fair to say I support it in the abstract, and I’d strongly support some sort of commission to work with the teachers and their unions to come up with something that would work, and work well. But I don’t know that it can be made to work without involving the teachers. Like I said, my girlfriend is a teacher. I’ve seen how it works, you don’t have to jump up to politicians. If you just jump up to the people one step above them making the curriculum, they’re so out of touch it’s ludicrous, and they don’t give a damn about getting input from the teachers who actually see the kids every single day. That’s just silly, to me.

I’m definitely against the pay-for-performance model. You can tell when a salesperson works on commission, and you also know the corporate culture can be toxic. If you tie performance to pay in education, then schools become more and more like corporations, and you take more of the goodness out of schools and put in more of a cutthroat culture.

And that’s not even mentioning the difficulty in an outside institution (like the federal government) assessing which teachers perform better.

Maybe crowdsource it to the teachers, the people on the front lines, and ask them what might be a fair way to be evaluated.

I’d love that, actually. When I was a teacher, I thought it was lame that politicians listened to educational theorists and high-level administrators instead of actually talking to teachers and asking the teachers what’s needed to make things better.

Really? So if I take the best teacher in the country, put her in front of a class of 30 students who have varying abilities (most of which on the low end), who all have behavioral or psychological problems, some of whom have learning disabilities of varying types; give that teacher no textbooks (or ones falling apart), no pencils, no computers, a room that’s constantly a mess; create a culture of low achievement and high grade inflation where every challenge to authority must be disciplined immediately or else the students will run amok—somehow that teacher is going to do better than a mediocre teacher with a class size of 14 students who all get outside tutoring, parental support, computers, textbooks, pencils, a clean building, a school culture of students being treated like responsible adults and, for the most part, living up to that expectation?”

Well this seems a bit of an overreaction. He said it was the most important factor, not the only important factor.

Other than that, pretty good stuff. My girlfriend is a teacher, so it’s something I’ve thought and talked a lot about as well.

I like the idea of merit-based pay for teachers, because the amazing ones definitely do deserve to be recognized and rewarded over the crappy ones that don’t care. But I also recognize that that’s incredibly difficult to evaluate. Using something like standardized testing just leads to teaching to the test and/or cheating. If I were in the position to do something about it, I’d love to pitch the idea to the head of the NEA or whoever, make it clear that we aren’t going to implement something unfair, and ask for their help. Maybe crowdsource it to the teachers, the people on the front lines, and ask them what might be a fair way to be evaluated. I think we could come up with a way to do so that’s fair, it’s just not something that’s immediately obvious or easy.