Posted by bhauth ·

From your last sentence, I’d guess that you’ve been on the internet just long enough to read this post and comment thread. Look around, the net is full of libertarians applying efficient market theory to everything that they can nail it to. Jane Galt is a prime offender.

As for my sarcastic tone marking me as a jerk – again, when you’ve been cruising the net for more than 30 minutes, you’ll have seen true sarcasm. You’ll also see libertarian-flavored posts where you can’t figure out if they’re serious, or mocking.

I do agree that my Colbert impression really s*cks – I don’t have the screaming eagle soundtrack, or an animated picture of me waving a huge US flag.

We find that while the quality of the average new female teacher has fallen only slightly over this period, the likelihood that a female from the top of her high school class will eventually enter teaching has fallen dramatically from 1964 to 1992 by our estimation, from almost 20% to under 4%.

“fallen only slightly.” tough to use that to prove anything about the general quality of education or of any given school.

smart women in other fields is good i think. it’s okay to take a hit in the number of girl-genius teachers to get girl-genius doctors, girl-genius politicians, girl-genius engineers, etc. even so with some fiddling with pay scales at public schools, prolly some geniuses would come back, but not the whole 20% from the ‘60s.

it isn’t that either, now, but i think both the dreams and the sense of what’s sexy-to-do have shifted away from the public sector. all the big things people were building along with the school system then are maintenance chores now. just for example, compare the space race with the space shuttle. NASA is in a sunset industry, being replaced by low cost commodity sharks.

“the end of history” also to me seemed to mean the end of development of the child-raising fabric. from here on in, everything just happens automatically. the society’s aggressive “spending” of the time parents might give to childrearing i think shows this feeling that education is tap water in a bottled water world – you’ll miss it but maybe not for a couple days.

it’s a trap of course – we have a slog ahead of us with environmental issues and we need the kids to be ready – autopilot won’t navigate it.

Well, not unless you count all the teenage “children” having babies before we’ve gotten around to giving them a Mickey Mouse high school education, much less a real, useful (currently college) education.

Lengthening childhood in the way that we have done not only takes away valuable years from our effective lifetimes, but opens up a large window of opportunity for still-helpless-and-ignorant teenagers (instead of educated and adult teenagers) to do something stupid.

So, yes, I’d say that educating children for longer than ever before, and making them be children for longer than ever before, is a really bad thing.

Tying this in to the original post, many of the parents who support public schooling and who want their children to be well educated are in the position where one of the highly educated parents ends up devoting great energy to their children’s education (subsidizing). So, again, we have a portion the female workforce who, this time by choice and opportunity, chose to forgo a time-consuming career in favor of childrearing. (Wasn’t there a post, recently, about lazy rich mothers who stay at home and do nothing?)

But wasn’t it ever so? The cohort of intelligent teachers mentioned in the post did not teach for very long. Most of those women taught for a short period of time and then gave up teaching to child rearing and community service. They may have returned to the workforce at a later time, but not necessarily as teachers.

My grandmother was graduated summa with a degree in physics in 1923. She was a high school Latin teacher until she had children of her own. Later, she returned to a research and writing position, as it was then possible for women to do so. I don’t think her case is typical, yet, the pattern of education, then teaching/nursing, followed by child-rearing must have been very common.

That’s not to say that there were a number of dedicated, female, career teachers of great skill and intelligence (I’ve known my share), but that the group of “brilliant women who made their life in the classroom” was, in reality, much smaller than the group of women who were highly educated and went into teaching.

Further, I believe that great teaching involves not only an intelligent teacher, but also one who loves to teach and who creates a strong emotional bond with the children. I’m partial to the idea that without caring there is no learning. Along those lines, children who do a lot of distance learning end up becoming very adept at self-study, learn to overcome a great amount of frustration by themselves, but lack the spark of motivation that often comes from teachers, and the intense emotional experience of learning that is not only driven by the subject matter but by the teacher-pupil diad.

It is an option only for families that have one member who is willing and able to give up full time employment and has the requisite skills to teach.

Homeschooling is fine for the above minority, but it can’t contribute to education reform in any way except as a drain of the most talented and involved parents from local school districts.

(It is, I believe, a right of parents to homeschool their children regardless of the negative externalities).

I agree there is a lot of potential here, and the massive rise in homeschooling in the US is associated with the technological developments you talk about. I think we’re quite far from being able to teach writing and appreciation of literature etc in the way slocum describes, but Fredrick Hess has a nice article a couple of years back in Education Next about technology in which he mentions software that grades grammar, spelling, and style in writing.

I’m curious, slocum, how much you have to help? I reckon I could help my kid up to and past calculus, but my spouse is already streteched (my daughter’s in 4th grade). If all the kids whose parents can help them are being homeschooled, that leaves the public school system with even more challenges…

Um, I was pulling a bit of a Colbert there; I guess that I wasn’t obvious enough. I gave the standard libertarian scenario, using the standard libertarian assumptions. Since Megan likes to use such efficient market hypotheses, I figured that she was fair game.

It’s possible. I have a high-school aged son taking an online Math course and it’s working out very well. BUT…the interactive nature of the course is such that the importance of the teacher is greatly reduced (in my son’s case, anyway), so it doesn’t matter if the instructor is great or lousy. In fact, the teacher has not really taught my son any math at all, and that’s the way he likes it. All the teacher has done is the clerical stuff.

It’s really pretty cool. Because the work is self-paced all the BS about meeting every daily deadline for homework is gone. There is no paper to shuffle back and forth (or for the teacher to grade). No hours of drugery in class spent grading and reviewing homework (most of which you already understand). Problems are graded as they are completed, and the instant feedback makes an enormous difference. If my son gets an answer wrong, the software offers to hyperlink him back to the relevant section in the text and then serves up another problem of the same type. It really does make a standard classroom/paper-and-pencil math class seem like a relic from the middle ages.

But the change is a big one, so I think it’ll be adopted slowly (and, of course, the unions can be counted on to fight it).

Re an earlier comment of yours, you say that barriers to entry do not seem to be a problem as there are many alternate paths to entry these days. This is certainly the impression you would get from reading the newspapers, but it’s not really true. Teachers who have alternate certification are frequently looked down upon and the programs are quite controversial within the public school world. There’s a strong feeling in education, especially in public education, that you had a lifelong passion for teaching and you jumped through the standard set of hurdles or—or what the hell are you doing teaching? There’s a strong feeling in the public school world that only teaching prepares one for teaching, that other fields do not have transferable skillsets, and in fact that the time you were spending in them is proof of your unsuitability to work with children.

Furthermore, the bureaucracy to get any sort of certification is really nontrivial. Here in Massachusetts, the Department of Education is well-known for not answering its phones, ever. Or talking to you if you go there in person. The only way to get your certification paperwork processed at all is via their web site (great for me, not so great for my technophobic aunt), and it takes a few months. How many months is really a random function (a problem when you need stuff according to the school calendar’s deadlines), and there’s nothing you can do to speed the process along. In the meantime, of course, there are processing fees you’ve paid out of your own pocket, and tests you’ve taken, again paid for out of your own pocket, and they’re not really cheap tests.

Public school teaching still very much expects people to enter along the standard path and sets up significant logistical and cultural hurdles against those who do not. Yes, people in high-demand professions still get jobs, but not because their alternative certification is somehow respected; merely because there are no other warm bodies available to fill the job. I was able to get interviews as a Latin teacher (very high-demand in Massachusetts) with an irregular certification pathway, but only in July, and only because conventionally certified candidates literally could not be found.

Which is another reason I teach in private schools; I have coworkers who have done all sorts of things besides teaching, and the culture of private schools treats this as a positive, a representation of intellectual and personal diversity which will lead to a more interesting educational experience for the kids, not as evidence that these people shouldn’t be teachers.