A Philosopher's Blog

Philosophical Essays on Many Subjects

Archives for September 2010

Why So Few Excellent Teachers?

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University of the Pacific Arthur A. Dugoni Sch...
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Since I have a fair amount of experience in higher education, I will venture to answer this question. One obvious reason is that teacher salaries at the K-12 level generally are not that great. However, even when the salary is good, the rewards for excellence tend to be disproportionate to the excellence. That is, teachers often get out far less than they put in.

Interestingly enough, one drain on the pool of excellent K-12 teachers is probably higher education. If someone loves to teach and has excellent abilities, they will quickly realize that the college/university level provides far more return for the effort. The pay, status, facilities, and benefits are generally much better. The problems are far less. In my own case, I did a stint as a high school teacher. While I love to teach, running study halls, dealing with discipline problems, and so on all made the job more of an ordeal than a pleasure. So, I did the obvious thing and became a professor, thus keeping the best aspects of being a teacher and ditching most of the bad ones.

Another obvious drain on the pool of excellent teachers is that someone who has the virtues needed to be an excellent teacher (intelligence, knowledge, leadership, creativity, charisma and so on) can excel in other fields that generally offer far more to a person. Such an amazing person could start her own company, have a high paying and rewarding career, or become a major force in politics. While some people do find the rewards of teaching to be sufficient, obviously enough most people with such excellence do not. They seek other careers and far greater rewards.

While it is tempting to say that such excellent people should be suitably rewarded (bribed) into going into K-12 teaching, there is the obvious question of whether the resources spent to get such stars would yield greater benefits than spending the same resources to get more average teachers. While sports teams can often afford to pay stars cosmic wages, there are actually very few professional sports teams while there are many,  many schools.

Of course, improving salaries and fixing the problems that make teaching K-12 unpleasant can go a long way in improving the quality of education. This might well be better than trying to take a star approach.

Another reason why there are so few excellent teachers is that there are relatively few truly excellent people. After all, think about your own general experiences at stores, work, and so on. How many truly excellent and amazing people do you know? Of course, I suspect that one reason why we have few excellent people is that our educational system has some serious problems. This creates a rather unfortunate problem: we need a better education system to get better people, but we need better people to have a  better educational system.

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Luck & Education

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Seal of the United States Department of Education
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Education is once again in the spotlight and what this light reveals has generally not been very good. Since the general consensus is that education is “broken”, I will not endeavor to argue for that point. Instead, I will look at the role that luck plays in the American education system.

I am not taking luck as some sort of metaphysical force on par with the ancient Greek concept of Fate. Rather, I’m using the term in a fairly general sense to stand for what depends primarily on chance rather than choice.

One obvious role that luck plays in education (and life in general) is the matter of birth. A person’s parents and their economic status have, obviously enough, a huge impact on a person’s educational future.  While the role that the parents play in the education process is important, the factor I will focus on is the matter of economic status.

As a matter of fact, the quality of schools tends to vary in proportion to the wealth of the surrounding community (with some notable exceptions). Parents generally know this and often attempt to move into the neighborhoods that serve the best schools. Obviously enough, parents who lack the money needed to live in such areas will generally lose out on getting their kids into the better schools. This will begin the process of shortchanging their education and this will most likely lay down a weak educational foundation.

Money also allows parents to send their kids to private schools, an option that is generally not open to poorer families. While private schools are not always better than public schools, parents can buy a good education for their kids provided that they have the money and do some research. For the kids this is, obviously enough, all a matter of luck-being born into a family that has enough money to buy a good education either directly (private school) or indirectly (by living in the right area).

The solution  to this is obvious enough: make all public schools good, that way luck/chance is less of a factor in the quality of education that American children receive. Of course, the idea of making things equal and fair might be regarded by some as a sort of creeping socialism. After all, if all the schools were equally good, people might start thinking that other inequalities will need to be addressed. Perhaps that is why certain folks are against true education reform: they can see where it might lead.

Another way in which luck plays a role is clearly an example of chance. I recently learned that some of the best public schools actually have a lottery system. As such, getting into such schools is (supposed to be) entirely a matter of luck. While this can be seen as a random sort of democratic approach, it hardly seems like a very good approach. While having some good schools that people want their kids to attend so badly that a lottery is needed is better than having none, but it seems unjust to leave something so important to random chance. The solution, as before, is to work so that all schools are good and thus eliminate the need for a lottery to divide up scarce resources. Of course, this is easy to say but hard to do. Obviously, we are busy dumping vast sums of cash into two other countries and our war machine, so it is hardly surprising that funds are a bit short for such endeavors. However, we might find that as well are trying to build up Iraq and Afghanistan, that we are sliding down ourselves-at least when it comes to education.

Of course, the problem of education cannot be fixed merely by throwing money at it. Many of the fixes would actually save money or cost little. But, more must be said about the solutions.

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A Farewell to Chalk

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stick-slip effect with a shalk on a blackboard
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As a young student, I was not very fond of chalkboards, probably because they often figured prominently in various punishments (cleaning them or writing something 100 times on them both come to mind). In college I grew indifferent to them, but when I first started teaching I disliked them. Too much dust, too much squeak.

Then I encountered dry erase markers and white boards. At first, they seemed kind of cool: bright colors, no dust, and no squeak. My positive view lasted about as long as my first dry erase marker (that is, not long).

One reason for my lack of love for dry erase is purely practical: the markers cost way more than chalk. But, one might wonder, why should I care? Doesn’t the school provide supplies? Well, I did get a box of expo markers once, a few years ago. Since then I have had to buy my own.  Chalk is wicked cheap, so my wicked cheap side likes chalk.

Another reason for my lack of love is that the dry erase markers are plastic and run out quick. That means that at the end of the semester I’ve used up a lot of plastic. Sure, they might recycle it (or not), but chalk just turns to dust as you use it. I suspect that creating chalk also has less environmental impact. Or perhaps they have to kill an endangered chalk owl to make each box. I never asked because I suspect that might be true.

Chalk also has in its favor that you can tell how much chalk is left in a piece by looking at it. With a dry erase marker, I find out that it is dead when I try to write, then start digging through my backpack trying to find a live one. Never had that problem with chalk.

Another handy thing is that when another professor was out of chalk, I could easily break my piece in half, thus sharing the chalk. While I can break a dry erase marker in half, that generally does not work out quite so well.

Sadly (or maybe not) I’ve accepted that my chalk days are over. All the classrooms where I teach now have dry erase boards (probably to condition the students for corporate culture by getting them accustomed to  people  putting ridiculous things up on a white board). I admit that I have been carrying a few pieces of chalk, on the off chance I would someday see a blackboard again. But, I accepted the end today and put my chalk away.

Of course, I didn’t throw it away. Maybe someday we’ll learn that dry erase markers cause thyroid inversion or spontaneous goat pox and the chalk board will be back. On that day I will be ready, regardless of how poxed my goats are.

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On Being Freshly Pressed

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WordPress
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Like most folks on WordPress, I see the Freshly Pressed blogs each time I log in. If a title or graphic interests me, I will go and check it out. I was recently pleased to see one of my own posts listed as Freshly Pressed.

There are two main effects of being Freshly Pressed. The first is that the hits to the blog go way up. Second, that post is flooded with comments.

In regards to the blog hits, it might interest some to know that it is a spike in two ways. First, there was a massive increased of hits from previous days. Second, the hits are a spike in that they are very large on the pressed post but there is little spread to the other posts. As such, it seems that people come to see the post and then most depart without looking around much more.

I did notice that the hits were greater on the second day of being Freshly Pressed. But this might be due to the day of the week rather than due to the second day being a spike day. I suspect that the long term impact of being pressed will be very modest or even minimal. My 15 minutes of blog fame, so to speak.

As far as the comments go, I suspect that people are mainly drawn to comment on a Freshly Pressed post out of a desire to funnel traffic to their own blogs. This is, of course, sensible and all part of the blogging game. However, some people are clearly interested in the post itself and have some interesting and relevant things to say. As with the hits, the comments also seem to be a spike. They increased dramatically and center on the post. While I did get some extra comments on my other posts, the comments are clearly focused where they can do other bloggers the most good-on the Freshly Pressed post.

I’m reasonable sure that the hits and comments will soon return to their previous quantities: good, but hardly remarkable. On one hand, I will be sorry to see my fleeting minor fame fade away. On the other hand, being Freshly Pressed is a bit like hosting a free beer keg party: people you don’t know show up, tap the kegs and leave…most likely to never be seen again now that the kegs are dry. While having such a party is fun for a while, having one everyday would get a bit tiring.

In any case, I appreciate the folks at WordPress picking my post and I am glad that so many people stopped by to read, comment, and plug their own blogs.

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Pledging a Deficit

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"Republican Party Elephant" logo
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While I have been accused of being a typical liberal, I am actually a fiscal conservative. This means that I think that we should be careful in our expenditures and be certain that what we are getting is worth the cost. I am also not a big fan of taxes. In general, I think that I can spend my money more wisely that the folks in Congress. However, I do recognize the need to fund essential public goods and services, such as education, defense (against enemies foreign, domestic and medical), and infrastructure.

When Republicans talk about cutting the deficit and reducing taxes, my ears perk up a little bit (they would perk up more, but I am familiar with their past promises). Seeing their actual plans, in contrast, makes my eyes sad. This was true in the Contract with America and is also true in regards to the latest Republican “X to/with/on/behind America.”

In addition to the usual vague statements about “traditional family values” and reducing the deficit, they also present a fiscal agenda. Unfortunately, this agenda is inconsistent with reducing the deficit.

First, they plan to extend all the Bush tax cuts. While this is supposed to help the economy, the fact that these tax cuts have been in effect through the recession should indicate something about how effective they are in that regard. As far as the deficit goes, the estimate is that keeping all the cuts in place will increase the deficit about $4 trillion by 2020.

Second, they plan to offer small businesses new tax breaks over the next two years to the tune of $25 billion. While the received wisdom is that small businesses create jobs, the actual job numbers seems to contradict this. If this is the case, than tax cuts for small businesses would not be a wise investment and would seem to primarily serve to increase the deficit. Of course, politics is a largely about perception and not reality and the perception is that small business is the key to American employment.

Third, they explicitly leave national security funding out of the cuts, despite the fact that defense and security spending are truly massive. It is indeed ironic that one area in which some meaningful and effective cuts could be made is being placed off limits. Lest anyone think I am anti-defense liberal, my view on defense spending is largely influenced by Eisenhower and Gates. As such, I am for an effective defense while being against the defense of the bloated and wasteful.

Fourth, as far as what they plan on cutting, they point to $100 billion in discretionary spending that is not related to security. However, this is a rather small amount and the plan is currently lacking details as to what, exactly will be cut.  They also say they will push back Obamacare while also suggesting that any popular aspects of the plan will be retained.

In light of this, it seems unreasonable to believe that the Republicans plan would actually reduce the deficit. In fact, it seems reasonable to expect that it would actually increase it. They, as politicians do, rely on the hope that people will be taken in by their vague promises while not actually looking at the details. The Republicans promised fiscal restraint years ago and then spent eight years amassing a mountain of debt. I suspect that they will do the same if given the chance.

Lest anyone leap in and accuse me of favoring the Democrats, I will say that Clinton did a good job, but that it seems equally unlikely that the Democrats will do anything meaningful about the deficit. I had hoped that the Tea Party would have had more of an impact on the Republicans, but it seems that spending is now hardwired into both parties.

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