Why Learning isn’t a Means to an End
It’s actually an end in itself, which is something this testing-focused culture of ours seems to miss.
This short animated video was commissioned by the guys who did South Park, and illustrates this beautifully. (thanks Eric)
Let’s Build a New System
Educational consultant Barbara Brier writes about how the current educational system can’t be saved, and references a phenomenal post by Tom Haskins.
After reading smart people like Dan Pink and Sir Ken Robinson, understanding how technology is changing our lives, and speaking to several teachers recently who all echoed similar sentiments, I think she’s right.
Most attempts to fix the system are incremental. Things like “stronger, more consistent curriculum standards nationwide; lengthening the school day and year; and improving teacher quality through merit pay and other measures.”
How about re-imagining what learning could be like, and then going to build that?
We have the luxury of not being the incumbent, but we have the challenge of trying to institute change from the outside.
Either way, something needs to be done.
So, off to write some more code…
Turning Teachers Into Rockstars
From the NYTimes last week on hedge fund manager salaries:
To make Alpha’s list, a manager needed to earn at least $240 million last year, nearly double the amount in 2005. That is up from a minimum of $30 million in 2001 and 2002. Combined, the top 25 hedge fund managers last year earned $14 billion — enough to pay New York City’s 80,000 public school teachers for nearly three years.
Doing the math means that each NYC public school teacher makes, on average, $58k per year.
Now, last year a report on education in the US found that this country is on the brink of an educational crisis:
The Teaching Commission notes that “our schools are only as good as their teachers,” yet this “occupation that makes all others possible is eroding at its foundations.” Top students are far less likely to go into teaching today; salaries are stagnant; nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave within five years. To remedy this, the commission calls for raising teachers’ base pay, finding ways to reward the best teachers, raising standards for acquiring a teaching degree and testing would-be teachers, on the basis of national standards, to be certain they have mastered the subjects they will teach.
People don’t work for money, they work for meaning. But when the disparity between the upside of working at a teacher (avg 58k to maybe 80-90k after a lifetime of service) versus working in another white-collar job (6 figures after a few years, up to $1.7B if you’re the hotshot hedge fund manager) is too large to ignore for many of the most talented folks.
The question then becomes, how to close the upside gap between being a teacher, and working in another, more lucrative job?
There are incremental solutions, like the findings in this report released by the Center for Teaching Quality in North Carolina. It calls for pay based on performance, and not seniority… rewards should go to teachers with better-performing students, and to teachers that do more work outside of the classroom. We fully endorse that idea, but there are more dramatic ways to close the upside gap.
The way we’re approaching it here it to help teachers scale their expertise by enabling teachers to reach more students. The best teachers in the world shouldn’t be constrained by physical walls that enable them to reach a few thousand students a year at most. Those best of the best should be rock stars, and should make more money than crappy teachers whose lectures you have to struggle to stay awake in.
Helping education scale effectively is a problem we’re working to solve at Education Revolution. It excites me that by achieving this, we’ll not only be incentivizing super smart people who might otherwise go into I-banking to help the world become a smarter place, but also help drive change in an industry that badly needs it.
