Scapegoats and Saviors IV

the final article in my series about teachers bringing sexy back to education

The Age of Quants: An Introduction

Quant- (noun) a person who understands by determining a numerical value of things; one who sees the world through a lens of numbers

We are a culture obsessed with numbers. And for good reason: a solid statistic is hard to argue with. From stocks, to movie ticket sales, to batting averages, to votes on American Idol, we derive a great deal of information about what we value from numbers. Conversely, however, we love to argue with numbers. Debates about climate change, the electoral college, and who is the greatest pop star in the world all straddle the fault lines of the reliability of data.

Most often, we use and celebrate data that support our conclusions; we refute or ignore data that challenge our conclusions. I do not point this out because I wish to make the point that we are stupid, listless morons who eschew the very fundamentals of inquiry (although: sometimes we are).

I point it out because, in our cultural dialogue, statistical data doesn't always end debates.

Often, we argue about the efficacy or value of the data. We talk about who came up with the data, what motives the data collectors had. We like our data to come from 'trusted sources.' In our culture, this often means that we like our data to come already packaged to support our political or personal belief systems.

We like boutique data. Personalized data. Friendly data.

Keep this in mind as we talk about how to integrate 'data' into teacher evaluations.

Scapegoats and Saviors: A Recap

In parts I-III of this series, I presented the reasons why tenure is doomed. I explored how the American public will no longer accept the status quo regarding teacher quality. Simply too many poor teachers have served in public education; the national argument about taxes has sharpened the teeth of critics of teachers. Student academic performance, long ignored and undervalued, appears to be finally affecting national performance in the private industry. Americans are beginning to truly imagine what a future will look like when we are outplayed by smarter, better trained foreign competitors.

People are angry. On the left and on the right. Everyone agrees: schools need to improve. The current political answer is to improve things through tests.

Race To the Top: A Quick Review

President Obama's 'Race to the Top' is an unparalleled game-changer in education reform. In this massive project, states compete for federal money. Any state that accepts the federal money has to play by certain conditions-- and one of the most important conditions focuses on teacher evaluation through student achievement on standardized tests.

By making it an opt-in, Obama has already gotten over the biggest hurdle of government reform: “the death by a thousand cuts” of legislative compromise. There was barely an argument about RTT because it doesn't act like a law. It acts like a contract. If your state doesn't want to play by the rules, then you don't need to care about it. But if your state won money, then teachers in your state will be evaluated through student performance on standardized tests.

I've tried to distill what RTT is about. There appear to be three goals to RTT:

1) boost student progress across the nation through the use of standardized tests

2) remove the protections that tenure offers to ineffective or poor teachers

3) connect (politically) “getting rid of bad teachers” with spending more money on education

Even in a lousy economy, people are willing spend a lot of money to get rid of bad teachers and increase student performance. Brilliant, right?

The $4 billion offered by RTT has been the milkshake that has brought all the states to the yard-- or, almost all of them. Over 40 states have gotten into the running-- all accepting the premise that teacher pay would be connected in some way to student performance. The states that have won the money have taken the first big step to replacing tenure as we know it.

New York state, where I teach, has won hundreds of millions of dollars this summer through RTT, as did over 40 other states that are accepting RTT money in some form. The ball is rolling.

I'm not sure people understand that this is already happening.

It's the Teachers, Stupid

“These new tests will be an absolute game-changer in public education.”

Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education

Here is the rub: this new model puts standardized tests at the center of everything.

The paradigm shift is nothing short of tectonic; the impact on teacher evaluation is impossible to refute. In fact, everything in education will bend to the new gravity forces of testing.

This is a mistake. Standardized testing cannot lead the reform. Yes, improving tests is a good idea. But testing simply cannot be at the center of public education.

Investigate the track record of standardized tests like IQ and SAT and you won't find much that speaks to bettering student performance. Standardized tests do little help the learning process; broad standardized tests ONLY serve evaluation purposes.

Tests are tools. That's all that they can be.

Using tests to improve education is like regulating drum beats to make songs more moving or wonderful. It's like regulating surgeon scalpel sizes to make people more healthy. It doesn't make sense. Education, like music and medicine, isn't just a science. It's also an art.

The most important thing in education is the relationship between students and teachers.

And the most important thing in a good student/teacher relationship is a good teacher.

It's not the tests! It's the teachers! We have to focus on the teachers!

New Tenure: Checks and Balances

Let's improve education by making better teachers.  We'll do it by rewriting how people become teachers.

I propose that we focus on how we can use system I'm calling “New Tenure” to develop and protect great teachers. The lion's share of our money, talent, and effort should be dedicated to developing a culture that will produce kick-ass educators. We need to make schools into farm systems that generate great teachers.

We can do this by using the quantifiable data right alongside qualifiable data.

We need to broaden the sources of teacher evaluation. That's right: teachers need MORE official evaluation. Face it: teachers are constantly being evaluated by everyone--but so little of it has any professional or useful impact.

Here's one way we could do it-- I'm sketching very broadly here because only experimentation will bear out the best ways to do this. These ideas, however, should form the basis of how tenure is awarded and maintained.

You listening, US Ed Secretary Arne Duncan?

New Tenure Teacher Evaluation: Four Sources

1. Student Performance. In the Age of Quants, we must accept how much we love the numbers generated by things like standardized tests. We cannot-- and should not-- get rid of them. I say we keep standardized tests but remove them from their ever-growing privileged place at the center of evaluation of teachers.

2. Administrator Input. Managers will continue to provide anecdotal evaluation of teacher performance. Teachers will be evaluated as “Unsatisfactory,” “Satisfactory,” or “Kick-Ass.” Ok, maybe not Kick Ass. But something like that. The point is to focus on the idea of valuing and striving for astonishingly good teachers.

3. Student/Parent Review. This has been done for years in universities and colleges- but I suspect it will work best as non-anonymous. Elementary and Secondary models should be different. Perhaps it will follow a “Yelp” or “Amazon” ratings model. It'll allow for a productive outlet for the most vital (and viral) of current evaluations. No more gossip. You put your name on an evaluation of a teacher.

4. Peer Review. My most revolutionary idea-- and my best. Every year, teachers will be evaluated by other teachers. Peer Review will function best if it is THE component that drives teacher development. 

By making teacher evaluation a more broadly sourced enterprise, based on both quantitative and qualitative data, we will build a culture of rigor and professionalism. We'll also productively engage ALL of the voices that already speak about teacher evaluation.

Teachers: The New Hotness

RTT is a good start but its focus on testing needs to change. Teachers don't need to be regulated through standardized tests. They need to be scouted, developed, and then protected.

Standardized tests should be made by great teachers-- not the other way around. Using standardized tests to try to make great teachers is illogical-- and a dangerous move. We need change, yes! But let's not put tests at the center of the education universe. And let's not put children there, either.

Let's build everything around great teachers. Everything else will follow.

Teachers need to be superstars. A great teacher should be as valued in our culture as a great surgeon or lawyer. As treasured as a great professional short stop or vocalist.

Imagine it: a kid's bedroom with a bed and a desk and a computer. The room has your typical kid mess: clothes draped on a chair and some empty cups on the desk. The bed is an unmade riot of sheets and kid stuff. There's a cell phone on a shelf, headphones hanging from a bed post.

On the closet door is a poster. It's the type of poster you see in any kid's room. The superstar is a woman who worked her butt off to be great. She's an innovator and a hardworking talent. The kid was proud to tack up this poster and looks at it at least once a day.

The hero on the poster is not holding a tennis racquet or a microphone.

She's holding a piece of chalk.

The Coolest Party Ever

commentary on the film, the social network

When did you join facebook?

Were you aware of how much your world would change when you did? Are you aware even now?

One of the many brilliant and wonderful things about David Fincher's riveting picture, the social network, doesn't happen in the film at all. It happens inside of you. When you watch this story about the most important website of our time, you can't help but see yourself on the screen.

“That's me up there,” you think without reflection. “I'm on facebook.” You picture your own page. With not a small amount of glee, you say to yourself: “I'm a part of this story.”

And you are. You realize it without realizing it. You ARE a part of this movie. And you love the film because of it.

And this is why this movie is the movie of our time-- at least, right now at this second. It's a movie about itself that is about all of us seeing this movie about itself. It's the title! We see this movie in order to exercise our own role, socially, in the network that 'the social network' the film is all about.

We watch ourselves watching ourselves.

It's a great story, too. It's about a friendship as much as it's about the birth of facebook. You'll care for these fictionalized, real people and wonder what they are doing now.

Mostly, however, you can't help but see how astonishingly significant facebook is.

What facebook has done to all of us is, well, kind of hard to grasp. It hasn't simply enhanced how we interact, made things more convenient, or virtualized real life. It's dramatically changed all the boundaries of the social game.

As Aaron Sorkin's sharply articulate script shows us, facebook has taken a simple truth of humanity (we love to include and exclude people from our lives) and intersected it with a complicated truth of the internet (it's a global connectivity network that one can access alone in intimate moments).

The result? Just like in life B.F. (before-facebook), we get access to people by giving them access to us. But now, W.F. (with-facebook) we can remotely share (and watch) the most private and real moments of human existence. With anyone we choose to share it.

As Mark Zuckerberg, played smartly by Jesse Eisenberg, reveals to us in the film: we love exclusivity. More than anything, we want control over access.  We want to be cool.

We want to have velvet ropes, bouncers, and lines to the party of our own lives. We want to control the guest lists and final approval on the official photos. We are in demand, hanging with other people who are in demand.

Facebook has done the impossible: it has allowed everyone to feel cool.

We all get to feel like celebrities, both elevated and scrutinized as well as reduced and commodified. 

We curate the photos of our lives that tell a narrative that we want people to see-- and others do the same with their photos. And it goes both ways.  Now we get pictures of people that we can look any time we want, of moments we'd only have access to if we were intimate friends. 

More so, you get to do this with acquaintances that you accept as friends- because facebook offers access to all 'friends.' Best friends, casual friends, barely friends-- if you are a friend, you get the whole enchilada. Privacy will never be the same.

Facebook has transformed us. 

After the seeing the movie, my friends and I went out to eat. One of my friends swore she knew the waitress-- from facebook. They had never met, but my friend was sure she could identify this stranger by name.  We, alas, never asked the waitress-- but there we were, watching her across the room, as she brought cocktails to another table.  She was the star of her own movie.  We were her interested audience.

Everyone has had this experience. Facebook has celebritified all of us.

Right now, even while you are reading this, someone is probably looking through pictures of you from your vacation this summer.  There you are on the dock, your feet in the water.  The light is perfect.  You look great from that angle.

Welcome to the new world of interaction.  The world of facebook.

You're cool.

Finding Studs

A product review of Zircon's “Studsensor Edge”

When you are looking for a stud, you get what you pay for.

Take a walk through the Home Depot and indulge yourself in a feast of products. From floor to towering ceiling, the airplane hangar showroom is filled with things you will and will never need. So many boxes! So many tools!  So many sales!

I don't know when hardware stores first grew into super-mega marts. When I was a boy, I'd steal away on an afternoon with some friends to kick around our small town of Skippack, PA. The hardware store in town was a playground of sharp tools, oiled bolts, and handwritten price tags. The narrow aisles were secret trails filled with accidental discoveries and hand-held reckonings. Holding a brilliantly fashioned tool or instrument, carefully made by a designer and craftsman, filled me with wonder.

A little paradise perfumed with graphite and pine.

Don't get me wrong: I love a mega-mart. I love the buzz of countless options, the giddy possibilities. Get me into a supermarket and I am totally gone, smile on my face, narcotized by the bright lights and dizzying variety of tasty morsels in little boxes.

Something's happened to quality in the shadow of the imperial scale of these market cathedrals. The little moments are gone, the intimate niches swept away. And when I hold Zircon's “Studsensor Edge,” I'm faced with the real cost of replacing little hardware stores with places like Home Depot.

A good tool doesn't need instructions. You pick it up and use it. This is why people like touch screens, tambourines, and crayons. No need to explain anything.

This grip-sized stick of uselessness gives you all kinds of directions. None of them help. Here's what will happen to you if you buy Zircon's “Studsensor Edge”

1. You'll hold the “Studsenor” up to the wall, hoping to find a stud (which should be fun anyway you interpret it)

2. It'll beep like crazy and you'll think “sweet! I found a stud!”

3. You'll move it around and find way more studs than could possibly be there

4. You'll check to make sure you're doing it right, redo it, and find a Million Studs March on the big open field of your wall

5. Rinse and repeat until you realize that little “Studsensor” just ain't playing fair with you

This little plastic tool, emergency yellow colored and as heavy as a deck of cards, completely sucks.

Don't buy it.

Go buy a well made tool and pay the higher price for it. And start doing that more often, for heaven's sake. Do it for the craftsmen (and women) of old, those designers who used to worship at the altar of quality.

And do it for tomorrow's kids who will be running around in the stores of the future.

Because who knows what we're going to replace mega-marts with.

The Teachers of Penzance

A song for an old teacher.



Bud Stock would say things that completely stupefied us.

Slowly pacing the classroom, he would leave chasm-sized pauses in his lectures. He'd stare out the window, like a captain gazing at the sea, absently pulling on his goatee. A minute would pass.

In the beginning of the course, some of us nurtured the belief that, sometimes, Mr. Stock would forget where he was. His AP English class was like no other AP class in school: slow-paced, recursive, and marked by silences. It was weird. His voice was slow, when he used it, and his cadence was measured on a scale that we teenagers did not understand. He took pauses between readings of Thoreau or Auden, O'Connor or Dickinson, stand like a statue at the bank of window panes, and say something that moved the ground.

“It's not really yours until you give it away.” He'd turn to us and ask “Or not. What do you think?”

It was Mr. Stock's mastery. He challenged our ideas and how we constructed them through choice texts, great pauses, and few words. We wanted to think like Mr. Stock. We wanted to answer his questions, read the pieces he gave us, and, well, be smart.

Were we tested? Sure. We had to participate in discussions, write essays, proofread each other, diagram sentences on the board, and read aloud. He famously hated talking about grades- and, yet, he graded us. Mr. Stock prepared us for the AP and SAT- and, yet, he rarely talked about either test. We were all evaluated using many nuanced, less quantifiable methods.

Mr. Stock was an artist and a technician. He served the quantifiable through qualitative measures.

Nonetheless, the million dollar question is (put in a big ol' pause here and stare out the window for a moment): would a formal evaluation of Mr. Stock show him to be a 'good teacher?'

Given the gravity of the decisions we have to make about education, nationally, it's actually a billion dollar question.

My answer: hell yes!

Mr. Stock was an artist and a technician. Like a good surgeon, attorney, or architect, he served the quantifiable through qualitative measures. He was well read. He knew his tests and his techniques. He knew his students. He knew that inspiration coupled with discipline made students sing.

Mr. Stock was the very model of a modern Major-General. Of teachers.

Everyone likes a pirate, sure. They look so cool.  But when the sea gets rough, and stuff gets bad, you don't care about cool.  What you want is a Major-General, a genius who has mastered information: animal, vegetable and mineral.

The challenge, of course, is to make a system that can attract, recognize, develop, evaluate, and reward a teacher like Mr. Stock.  A system suited to developing great artisans of teaching, broader than standardized lesson plans and byzantine testing systems.

'Cause it ain't what we got now. What we've got now is too many pirate kings singing songs of tax cuts, standardized tests, and teacher evaluations.

Here's to Bud Stock:  a navigator, a leader, an artist, a technician, and a model.  The very model.  Thanks, man.

NEXT EDUCATION BLOG:  my proposed system of improved teacher evaluation.  Tenure is dead!  Long live tenure!

California Teachers: Hot or Not?

Value Added and Reduced.


This week, the LA Times published the findings of a study of teachers and effectiveness. 6,000 third-fifth grade teachers, from all over California, were rated and ranked from “most effective” to “least effective.” The top 100 were highlighted in their own column.

Bombshell! Teachers across California must be rattled. In a world where tenure has reigned supreme for decades, suddenly teachers are being reduced to numbers. A California fourth grade teacher can look herself up, on the LA Times website, and find her rank. And so can anyone else.

How did they decide who was Hot and who was Not?

The LA Times developed this ranking on one statistical value derived from one place: standardized tests. While not complicated, it does take a little explanation:
1. Researchers compared a student's performance on state-wide standardized tests from one year to next year.
2. The difference in scores reflected a higher score, a lower score, or the same score.
3. After each student's net change score was tabulated, the students were grouped by teacher.
4. Each teacher group's average net change score was determined based on these numbers.

This “Value Added” score, the Times argues, allows for anyone to see what “value” any teacher has added to any of his students. Simple. Clean. A raw piece of data-- just what we love.

Ah, but not so fast. Data's beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

Those who challenge the data have some great arguments against the analysis. First, the data all hangs from the chain of the quality of the standardized tests. A 'good standardized test' has proven to be the the single hardest thing to build in the realm of student evaluation. Holy Grail hard.

Second, it's not that ONE test has to be terrific: the first year AND the second year test must give an accurate measure of a student's acumen. And then every subsequent test that is used in this manner. Furthermore, these tests must be built together in order to measure growth; the tests must work in concert in order to have comparative value.

Finally, the 'Value Added' score doesn't measure ability-- it only measures change. Take one example of the many scenarios that skew the data. Think about what happens when comparing a teacher with kids who start with an average of 95/100 to a teacher with kids who start out with an average of 45/100. The teacher with the better kids, weirdly, has a terrific chance of being ranked as a poor teacher.

However, those who support the data build a strong case, too. First, every teacher (and student) is measure using the same test. Subsequently, no matter how 'good' or 'bad' the test is, everyone is handled with equal fairness (and unfairness). This is true even in comparing first year to second year tests-- it's fair because everyone is measured with, theoretically, the same stick.

Second, no small number of students who had 'a bad day' will skew the data simply because all of the students took the test. Arguably, a nearly equal number of students would have had 'a great day' taking the test. The size of the sample smooths out the inconsistencies or anomalies. The more years this data is collected, the less the effect of accidentals.

Finally, supporters say, the data show that where a kid comes from (class, ethnicity, and gender) are far less important than the kind of teacher she has. This is good because we can finally separate the data about student achievement from the data about teacher achievement. The Value Added model focuses on growth as opposed to talent or natural endowment. (Richard Buddin, who wrote a paper about the data collection, loves to say the word 'endowment.' You have to love using that word earnestly. I implore you to work the word 'endowment' into conversations you have today.)

Find Buddin's work here http://www.latimes.com/media/acrobat/2010-08/55538493.pdf

These are just the arguments about the data and its collection. The hot and nasty arguments are about philosophy, cultural values, and professionalism. Rightfully, some of the argument centers on whether or not information about teachers' evaluations should be made public.

I'd like to offer a broader perspective.

The idea of ranking teachers is ridiculous. It doesn't serve to improve the profession; it only serves the media's love of bite-sized information that allows for thin conclusions. Henry I. Braun, in his treatment of Value Added Assessment, warns of the dangers of "casual interpretation" of data. The amount of ugliness that will follow the Times posting this information may very well swallow any other productive dialogue.

It takes a quality blindfold to pretend that something is rank-able just because it has a number attached to it. It's a shame that the solid journalism that supported this research has been shared in this way. The LA Times decision to rank the teachers has turned California into a Miss America contest. A beauty pageant isn't about beauty: it's about winners and losers. Revamping education will require a much wider, more informed view than that.

That said, evaluating teachers (like evaluating anything) requires some hard statistical data. Toss the ranking; keep the data. The “Value Added” Score provides non-anecdotal information about a teacher. For this reason, this statistical information, despite its potential flaws, is not only useful. It is important.

Stats like “Value Added” are essential. And, they are the future.

As you will read in my long-awaited final installment of “Scapegoats and Saviors IV,” at least part of teacher evaluation must come from a number like this. It cannot-- and should not-- be avoided.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/teachers-investigation/
Check out the LA Times to read the article yourself. I'd love to hear what you think about it.


If you really want to dork out (and I highly recommend doing so), peruse the scholarly work (including that of Buddin and Braun) on how and why they did the Value Added model.
lookee here:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-value-added-sources,0,6109096,full.story

Mosque-a-rade

James Madison said it would be better if we fought with ourselves.

In order to replace the centralized power of a king, emperor, or simple majority, Madison supported a system of warring factions. The irritating arguments on the TV and internet grow directly out of this idea. Because the writers of the Constitution built a system in which shifting partisanship replaced autocracy, we often find ourselves in rather Jerry Springer-like exchanges.

“These supporters of the Mosque are unAmerican! It's like the Nazis putting an ice cream parlor at Auschwitz!”
“Those who would deny the right of believers to build worship houses are unAmerican! How can anyone be so disgusting as to use this as a political weapon?”
“I don't know who my baby daddy is! And I don't care! I'm in love with my grandmother!”

The recent media kerfuffle over the so-called “Mosque at Ground Zero” affords the perfect cross section view of how the rich and lively politicization of our culture can unfortunately distort even our most simple values.

Madison's colleagues, the Constitutional Framers, made absolutely no bones about the importance of the separation between Church and State. These complicated men saw Tyranny (with a capital T) as the bane of civil stability, freedom, and growth. These people knew the Bible intimately; they also knew the writings of Locke and Rousseau. Almost all were churchgoers.

But they knew of the political obstacles of religion. The colonies represented an escape from religious intolerance and State-imposed beliefs. When Ben Franklin, that old charmer and partier, proposed that the Constitutional Convention should begin daily meetings with a prayer, the Framers voted it down. This isn't a legend. I saw and read Franklin's proposal, in his own handwriting, at the Library of Congress this past weekend.

(You have to go to the Library of Congress. It is so cool-- seriously, you will freak out. They have the most amazing stuff. Goosebumps, man. Not the book series-- I mean actual goosebumps on your arms. And neck.)

Wary of the monarchs and aristocracies of Old Europe, the Framers wrote and ratified a document that ensured that certain personal freedoms would be held as our most valuable. The First Amendment of that document identified the principal and preeminent of freedoms: liberty to think, believe, imagine, communicate, and protest.

The Framers sought no byzantine legal system of overseeing religion. They intended the government to simply stay out of personal spiritual business of the citizenry.

This separation between Church and State has provided no shortage of political division in our country-- and yet the most hardened partisans agree on the core idea. The government is to offer no special treatment or bigotry towards any religion. If one follows the civil laws of our country, then one can believe anything one wants.

Our government, therefore, may have no legal position on methods, or places, of worship other than on those that violate the law. It's astonishingly simple.

Those who call for the government to act on the “Mosque at Ground Zero” are, in effect, asking for the government to act in a “extra-Constitutional” manner. Keep this in mind the next time such a call comes from a voice from that also claims to support “smaller government.”

It's hard for me to imagine a better way for the “terrorists to win” than for us to depart from our most cherished values in the name of security or “sensitivity.” The reason “American values” infuriate the Islamic extremists is that, as the Framers knew, personal freedom dismantles the tools of tyranny. Freedom is contagious.

Bin-Laden has publicly decried the “godlessness” of America. His argument against the West is fundamentally religious in nature. He rallies extremists against the malevolent insensitivity of the Americans building military bases in Saudi Arabia. Al-Queda's stated goal is to expel American influences (bases, markets, churches, etc) from the sacred land of Islam.

How ironic that some in our culture would use the same argument to expel an Islamic prayer room from the sacred site of Ground Zero.

Conversely, how powerful for our country to remain steadfast to its Constitution, and the Church-State separation, even at our most sensitive and vulnerable underbelly.

To paraphrase Madison, "Father of the Constitution" and orchestrator of partisan bickering: may the better argument win.

Sigh. Indeed.

Saviors and Scapegoats III

“What we've got here is... failure to communicate.”


I like to reference Cool Hand Luke because it's such a great movie. Seriously, reread this article's opening line in your head with that dude's crazy voice from the film. Hilarious. Anything going wrong at any work place is on display in Cool Hand Luke. That movie ain't about prison. It's about business.

Education is business. Or, at least, that's how we like to talk about it. It's a losing government business, almost as financially stupid as defense. And education has been inching towards the “free market” for years. From standardized test vending to tutoring super-businesses to charter schools, private industry has been making inroads into “public” schooling for years.

Battle lines are drawn here. The teacher unions are against privatizing. Business leaders are against public spending that raises taxes. Liberals tend to be for budget increases in education. Conservatives tend to be for slashing budgets in education. (Disclosure: I am an elected representative in my school's teacher union. And I'm making bank in that gig! Disclosure again: I am not making bank. It's like $350 a year after taxes.)

This is the failure to communicate. We can't talk about better teachers because we can't stop talking about taxes.

Public Education Gets Kicked In the Privates

The debate about taxes, specifically public funding vs private funding, might be the most polarizing political argument in our country. Innovation in schools, like innovation in anything, costs money. Therefore, innovation, change, and growth in the field of education divide people right on the same line as taxation. Which is to say: most people do not seem to favor spending more money on education.

Duh. We've married “improving education” with “raising taxes.” It's like wedding “chocolate fudge sundaes” with “root canal work.” Can you imagine enjoying Ben and Jerry's on your couch while watching a stereophonic HD documentary of a dentist drilling cavities? This is what happens when people talk about improving education. They hear the high pitch drill of higher taxes.

So, the private sector looks like it may get another win. Charter schools, home schooling, industry incentives have all made it to the table. I already mentioned how private companies develop the standardized tests like the SAT and AP. Private answers to public problems have been winning all over our culture. In education, this is probably a good thing, at least in the near term. We might get beyond just talking about taxes and actually talk about innovation.

But long term, the private sector has troublesome issues. As awesomely awesome as the free market is, it runs best on customer satisfaction. In fact, it runs like a champ on the sweetest tooth of satisfaction: immediate gratification.

Put It In My Mouth

McDonald's doesn't do well because people appreciate the nutritional value of its food years after the food is gone. It does well because we eat it and enjoy it right now. No one takes a moment to reflect and say, “Five years ago, I ate an 800 calorie Big Mac instead of a fresh organic salad. (pause) Man, that was smart.” Big oil doesn't run the world economy because it makes long term sense. Using dead animals and plants that are millions of years old to power everything is astonishingly stupid. But who can care when we need to get somewhere in a car?

Doing something that is more expensive and less enjoyable doesn't really float in the free market. We spend way more on diet foods, books, and cosmetic surgery than we do on fitness. Like I've said, teachers must be free to be unpopular, irritating, and completely "unsatisfying" (in the immediate satisfaction model).

The Teacher Brain Drain

So, if the public model allows for those awful teachers I mentioned in part II and the private model works on a system that has trouble incentivizing teachers to be independent of customer satisfaction, what do we do?

I'm working on it. Generally, the private sector has a much better model to increase spending based on good quality. Likewise, the public sector does a much better job of sustaining stability regardless of economic conditions (or quality). I suspect we need to find a way to make public and private play more nicely together. And we need to a lot more imagination, as a country, to get around that corner.

But the radioactive conversation of taxes keeps directing us into the wrong conversation. It's not about HOW we pay. It's WHAT we are willing to pay for.

We need to bravely address the most important fact of education: great teachers make great students.

It's simple. We need well-trained, innovative, cream of the crop, badass, well-paid teachers. We need to entice talented people from the better paying, more respected gigs of our culture and get them in the classroom.

I think we start with tenure. I'd wager that if we do this right and people will be more willing to pay more for education, publicly or privately.

Check out part IV, the final installment of this series, for my thoughts on how to do it.