Flip The Curve!

In our continuing search for solutions to the education crisis, we should all be encouraged by the growing recognition of the value of great teachers. The best teachers get results consistently, year after year, with all of their students. It isn't magic and it isn't luck.

For too long, the role of great teachers has been diminished. Teachers have been viewed as fungible -- just another input into a system that has valued laptops and school buses as much as they have valued teachers. As long as a teacher graduated from a collegiate teacher prep program and passed the State certification test, then one was just as good as another. Results and skills have gone unremarked and unrewarded. The only way to boost your pay as a teacher was to get another degree, move out of the classroom in the bureaucracy or the administration, or just stay longer. Our pay scales and our entire teacher recruiting system is perfectly structured to encourage the best teachers to stop teaching, to get more degrees, to become a bureaucrat.

Teachers that simply teach, and teach well, are not the goal of our education system. Which brings me to the chart at the top of this post. The chart was included in a presentation by Bill Gates to the National Governor's Association last month. I think my friends at KitchenTableMath were the first to note the disparity between how much we spend on education and the lack of results for our money.
There's nothing new here -- the amount spent, per pupil, has increased dramatically, every year for decades. The results have been flat, as measured by the NAEP (which is the only test given nationwide to 4th and 8th graders and allows us to compare apples to apples across the States).

The US has got to figure out a way to increase the quality of education results but hold costs flat. There will be tremendous resistance to this idea. Just two nights ago, I was told again at my town budget discussions that flat spending in education is really a cut.

Here's my last slide from the Bill Gates presentation, showing the growth in education personnel from 1960 through the present.

The numbers of people employed at our schools  -- the teachers, teacher coaches, administrators, specialists, and other adults in the system  -- has exploded from 40 adults per 1,000 kids to 125 adults per 1,000 kids. That kind of employment growth is the reason that education has become very, very expensive. But for all of those very expensive adults employed at all levels of a particular school district, we have had almost no change in the results.

One solution is to increase class sizes for our very best teachers and eliminate our very worst teachers. Everybody else has got to improve.