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It would be cheap and extraordinarily simple to put 1000-student cohorts into different conditions and conclusively determine what is actually effective. It boggles my mind that such simple research hasn’t been done to conclusively put the issue to bed. What are we paying academics to do exactly? What are we paying the education bureaucrats to do? They have completely lost the plot. Fire all of them and replace them with a dozen highly motivated bloggers and we might actually get some conclusive answers to all of our questions. If some theorist has a new theory in education, let him prove it (double-blind controlled). Allot some money. Fuck, if you didn’t want to experiment on American kids, open up two schools in Nigeria for $400.
My God, even just paying kids to do an hour-long computer-driven program to determine the time-efficient benefit… like this shit costs nothing… fire every pedagogue and start over…
IIRC, Caplan has a claim that there is evidence that one method works (at least better than others). What I vaguely recall hearing is that the method is just very straightforward and mechanical, like, there's a book that the teacher reads from, basically word-for-word, asking for responses at certain points and such. The problem is that teachers hate it, because they have the idea in their head that their job must be intensely personalized and creative ("We're artists!").
This is very vague recollection, so it could be someone other than Caplan, but I remember the gist of the story. I never dug into it to see if there actually is good experimental support for such a proposition. Lots of education research that goes against the narrative of teachers unions and other lefties gets super buried (see also: Roland Fryer).
EDIT: Below, sarker got at least the name of the thing: Direct instruction.
I remember some controversies about that as well.
If the problem is something like that it's actually quite difficult to find enough people who are both willing to work with small children all day, and willing to follow rigid instructional scripts, this seems like a good opportunity for technological augmentation. If the lessons are scripted, why does it have to be the childcare worker reading the script? Couldn't some kind of anthropomorphic chatbot say the script, and the childcare worker gets to focus on ensuring the kids are actually doing what they should, settling disputes, ensuring some degree of order, emotional regulation, and so on?
Something tells me there’s no shortage of people willing to work with small children and also follow rigid scripts. There’s a shortage of people willing to get master’s degrees and then do that. Now of course you don’t need a masters degree, or even really a bachelor’s, to do that, except as required in applicable law, but then you have to change the law for elementary school teaching to only require a two year degree. Good luck with that.
I think an even greater factor than the education requirement is all the other BS that goes along with being a teacher. Paperwork, compliance, that sort of thing. Plenty of people (especially women) would love to work with small children and teach them how to read etc. but have little interest or talent in filling out miles of regulatory forms, requests, records, etc.. Besides the natural demands of motherhood, I think this is by far the greatest reason teacher burnout rates are so high.
That is a fantastic point. There’s been an overall decline in “free natural labor”, having been replaced with stressful paid labor in every case. Teaching the young is something that both men and women naturally find enjoyable and would do without pay — but they wouldn’t do it in stressful bureaucratic conditions and they wouldn’t do it every day. Instead of factoring for this in our culture, we simply eliminate this natural teaching instinct and focus on paying the stress-laborers. This is clearly inefficient, because if you can get people to do prosocial helpful things for free it’s always going to be more efficient. Other ways natural labor has been replaced: advising council to members of your community (therapists, psychiatrists, job coaches)
This non-bureaucratic labor may be cheap or free but it's not legible. How does the state know teachers are actually teaching without the mountain of paperwork? Maybe kids are slipping through the cracks and no state official knows about it.
An adult is unlikely to claim to want to teach a classroom for free but instead just sit there doing nothing. You can also have parents decide, or administer a test every two weeks, or etc. There is a huge middle ground between our current bureaucracy and placing a person of ill repute inside a totally unchecked environment
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