Edward Glaeser has an op-ed in the Boston Globe arguing for more education funding:
The clearest result from decades of education research is the importance of teacher quality. My colleague Tom Kane finds that students who are lucky enough to get a teacher in the top quarter of the teacher-quality distribution jump 10 percentile points in the student achievement distribution relative to children who end up with less able teachers. Improving teacher quality has about twice the impact on student outcomes as radically reducing class size.
[...]Attracting better teachers will also require much more money than $18 billion per year committed by President-elect Obama. Higher pay for successful teachers will make teaching more financially attractive. Just as importantly, it will send the message that our society values its educators.
Of course, as Brad DeLong notes, spending money on teachers is not a popular option. And we're talking about a lot of money, here. As I pointed out a while back, a college graduate with good math skills has a wealth of options with starting salaries at least $10,000 higher than teaching. And according to the government, there are about 4 million teachers in the US. Increasing all of their salaries by $10,000 would cost $40 billion, more than double the $18 billion Glaeser cites. And that probably underestimates the real cost of elevating the prestige of teaching to a point where it becomes competitive.
This is probably the best way to judge whether a politician or pundit is really serious about reforming or improving education. If they're talking about investing seriously large sums of money in our schools, they're probably worth listening to. If they're talking about spending a few million dollars, and counting on some gimmick to make everything wonderful, they're not serious, and ought to be ignored.
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But we can afford $800 Billion to pay for bad (and stupid) investments? We really need to get our priorities in order.
How about mandatory public service? With Emmanuel up there at the Whitehouse, maybe the new administration should start looking at a new version of the draft that the public can actually digest. A few months or years as school teachers, part or full time, with appropriate performance appraisals, should lower your taxes for life, or something like that. I haven't thought this through - but I'm sure people have.
Maybe grad students can TA at public schools. I know school students need that 'connection' with their teachers, but cmon, it needs to start somewhere. Grad students would really be effective - smart and able to explain things to kids better without thinking about their pay grade.
Teaching in public or private schools should over the next quarter century be linked with patriotism in the collective minds of this nation, just as serving in the military is.
(Of course, you do this at the risk of making all this sound like communism).
I agree with your goal and feel strongly about it. However, it seems like there are so many assumptions you make that I really wonder if you've got an even remotely reasonably solution.
How did they determine "teacher quality", and does it correlate with how the teacher was educated or how much the teacher is paid?
How are we measuring student achievement? Do students with higher quality teachers improve math and reading skills equally?
Are the people who are currently going into financial analyst and engineering jobs really good matches for teaching jobs? Is limited pay really the obstacle keeping potential good teachers from teaching? Does higher pay really always cause higher respect?
If a sausage factory's input is sawmill waste, how skilled must its workers be to produce satisfactory products?
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/belled.htm
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/comprom.htm
End the Department of Education, end Head Start. Revert education to local control. The only national oversight is privatized standardized testing. Nobody makes anything good without quality assurance on the floor and quality control before the shipping dock.
If defined classes of student prove to be ineducable that is not discrimination, that is empirical fact. Don't waste resources upon futility, train them into something else. Parris Island, before BAMs, proved nobody (living) is beneath specified utility.
Conscripted teachers are a terrible idea. Most would resent being sent to schools that really need help.
Keeping good teachers will require more then higher pay. It would require letting them teach rather then following the scripts and processes dictated by the "experts".
Local control of schools would be a major plus, but I would combined it with national testing system for all grade levels, including undergraduate college degrees. In fact I would recommend granting a degree to anyone who can pass the test, even if they have not went to college.
Local control of schools would be a major plus
And your evidence for this is what, exactly?
Local control is the system we currently have in most of the US. It works well for some school districts that are resource rich to begin with, but it's a problem for many urban and rural school districts who don't have the resources. Plus you are prone to local takeovers by, e.g., creationist nutjobs a la Dover, PA. And you will inevitably find that some fraction of the local populace is motivated to go out to budget meetings and argue against spending even a fraction of the money needed to fix these problems--these people are not evenly distributed through the population , so their impact will be concentrated in certain districts. Ideally the quality of public schools should not be such a strong function of your address, but that's the situation we have today.
One thing that has to happen is to reestablish the intergenerational social compact. When I was in elementary school there was a general understanding that it made sense to pay for good public schools even if you didn't have school age children because (1) your neighbors paid for your own education (or that of your children who had since graduated) and (2) you might someday have school age children or grandchildren, and most families could not afford to pay those expenses in real time. Then along came the "taxes are evil" crowd, starting in California with Proposition 13 and taking the White House with Reagan. This idea of "I've got mine, screw you" has predictably poisoned community relations. Unless we can relegate it to the fringes of political discussion, there is no chance of any such plan working.
"End the Department of Education, end Head Start. Revert education to local control."
LOL! Yeah, let appalacian inbreds teach their kids about evil-loution in the public schools .. oh wait - they are doing that now.
Why *less* central control of curriculum appeals to anybody as a solution, beyond knee-jerk thoughtless libertarianism - is beyond me.