Teachers make a huge difference. I think it’s important to pay them well, and to give them an incentive to stick around. It’s also important to treat them like professionals; to properly accredit them (but also to make that process easier for professionals in other fields); and to give them options that make their teaching careers better on the whole. So teacher choice, I’d say, ranks right up there with school choice in terms of things we should be thinking about in the education debates. Michelle Rhee seems to be on to something with her “green vs red” tracks. We’ll see how it plays out.The more I read about education reform, the more complicated it seems. I don't tend to think that teacher's unions are the only or even the major problem in education today, as states with excellent education have teacher's unions, just like states with poor education do. I am also wary about using purely statistical measures to measure education, as they smack of a statistical obsession that feels too corporate to me, and as The Wire shows, they can be juked to create the illusion of progress so as to take pressure off of responsible parties. My suspicion is that a lot of what's wrong with education isn't necessarily about the bureaucracy (though heaven knows there's much that's wrong there) so much as that a lot of the public simply doesn't see much value in education, either because they don't feel they can succeed or because it's seen as irrelevant to what people are dealing with, or both. Education can be the way toward class mobility and economic opportunity, but an awful lot of things have to go right in order for a poor rural white kid (or a poor urban black kid) to make it. And, on some level, the kids that do make it have to be self-confident enough to leave their communities behind--as Spike Lee memorably stated, trying to move out of the lower class is like a crab trying to get out of a bottle of crabs--they keep pulling you back in. So I tend to say that incremental reforms, like what E.D. is saying here, make sense to me. I'm not completely opposed to school choice, though I tend to be more supportive of charter schools than spending money on unaccountable private/religious schools. I'm a little skeptical about the merits of "competition" here, because I think that the relevant metrics are deeply flawed, and I don't know if the end result is more achievable with public schools bleeding money and their best students because I suspect that an easy path to reform would long since have been implemented. Clearly I have more reading to do on the subject.
I do think that this is a very smart idea:
I know that Germany does something similar to this. I think it's a good idea, and I sometimes take a beating for it from other liberals who are of the "everyone should go to college" mindset. That is just silly. I think everyone should be able to go to college if they want to and have the qualifications. But many have neither, so I generally don't think that "universal college" is a good idea. Some people just aren't built for that, and that shouldn't mean exile to a life of burger-flipping that is the life of not having a GED. There's nothing wrong with being a plumber in my book, and from what I hear the pay is pretty good. It's probably more exciting than any number of college-educated positions. Liberalism gets a bad name primarily because there is often an all-knowing sort of chauvinism at play, one which tends to treat women who choose to stay at home to raise kids as tantamount to sellouts, or that automatically assumes that pregnant teens ought to have abortions as a matter of course. I get the sense that education is part of this general tendency, that letting some students choose a career-oriented track instead of a purely academic one (I'm sure they'd still take some history classes!) is somehow consigning them to a life of vile servitude at the hands of The Man. But it's not. What liberalism is and must be is a way of maximizing the liberty of individuals to make the choices that are right for them. We educate, they decide. What choices they make ought not to concern us at all.Kids not academically inclined should have available to them apprenticeship-like programs designed to teach them useful trades. I think this could have a profound effect on graduation rates.
