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Today's AXC book review (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind) is about "The Educated Mind" by Kieran Egan. This is my second time reading half of it, skipping to the bottom, and feeling frustrated about it.
The reviewer is clearly invested, excited, and has put a lot of effort into their review. At the same time, I can't think of how the ideas, as presented, could possibly useful as a teacher, parent, or even if I were trying to design a new charter school or something.
A while ago, I went to a two hour lecture (with no breaks! In tight stadium seating, so it was impossible to even go use the restroom!) with someone going on and on about neural imaging and The Science of Reading (tm) and Background Knowledge and whatnot, with five minutes towards the end suggesting that perhaps it would be worthwhile to look into actual books or something sometime, as part of Professional Learning Communities (tm). These are, in general, things I'm interested in, but it was all about the five strands of something, which each split into three strands, which each have seven flavors, or something like that. There was no clever resolution as in the rhyme about the man going to St Ives.
This review felt kind of like that. It either is kind of the same as one would intuitively expect, and so doesn't need explaining (yes, of course we should tell stories. Clearly. Does anyone except Eustace Scrubb's parents disagree?), or it's something very complex that teacher's will struggle to follow and probably fail at (nobody is going to succeed at teaching "ambiguity, meta-skepticism, balance, lightness" in school, to ~30 assorted youth at a time).
A bit ago I was listening to Jordan Peterson interview a man who had opened up a private school in Wichita, Kansas (Zach Lahn, Wonder). The school sounded nice. I would plausibly send my children there, were I in a position to do so. They have a system with older students mentoring younger ones, a binary choice to discuss each morning, and one time they had a disrespectful student, but then they expelled him. It isn't just rich kids, he argued: he has a nurse working two jobs to pay the tuition! I stopped listening at that point, and felt a bit spiteful about it.
Maybe I should stop following this stuff, and just keep my head down. It's not like I'm planning to open up a new Eganian charter school in my city anyway. But educational discussions follow me around, haunting my steps, ever since growing on in a very countercultural, education aware household, reading John Taylor Gatto as a teen. I tried to go to in-person events, and it followed me. The ladies tea was talking about it, with a homeschooling mom of four, a mom with her kid in private school for culture war reasons, and someone getting people to sign a culture war adjacent education petition. I tried going to church, and the pastor's wife was talking in the nursery about Sunday School curriculum, with some sort of Montessori adjacent Catholic derived philosophy or something. I tried going to a friend's house, and they were also talking about Education. All of it sounds kind of exhausted and on edge.
One of my friends was asked to help develop parts of a national curriculum and tells me that teachers are pretty stupid, allergic to nuance and don't even follow the curriculum that much. Not all teachers and so on... But it was like there was some vast Power that was inserting errors of fact, errors of punctuation, errors of logic into the curriculum, that my friend was swimming against the tide. Endless anecdotes of frustration at incompetence.
I get the sense that mainstream education in the West is systemically broken, not something that can be fixed by tweaks around the edges. Sometimes you have to disassemble the whole thing and try again from another angle. It's like an auto-catalytic process: there's a force that makes certain dysfunctional teaching doctrines prestigious, so education professors teach bad dogma, smart people are filtered away by various incentives, bureaucracy proliferates out of control, behaviour and culture of school declines and everyone just asks for more money even as standards fall.
What can you do other than set up charter schools or similar outflanking? How do you change incentives if the institution is already rotten? If you reward schools with high graduation rates, they simply raise the graduation rate and everyone is worse off with grade inflation.
If the problem is that teachers are stupid and allergic to nuance, then structural changes are not going to have much effect. We're going to have to attract smarter, less nuance-resistant people to the teaching profession. And that is going to mean raising pay substantially. Because when I was teaching, we had plenty of smart, nuance-friendly Teach for America teachers, but the vast majority of them left to go to law/medical/business school.
Nah, just abolish teachers certificates -- anyone with a bachelor's in whatever can teach that subject. It's quite a comfy job for smart slackers, just that the pipeline tends to push those people on to something else -- which by the time they are done, another two years to get suitable indoctrinated is a bridge too far to consider.
Teacher's certificates are already not required to teach in private schools, or charter schools in some states. In some states, it's quite easy to get a teaching certificate -- people with a BA can attend night school while teaching full time (and the classes aren't all that hard). Difficult while raising young kids, but otherwise not too bad.
These states do not have better test scores. These states still have teacher shortages.
It's fine with me to let people with a Bachelor's in something, anything, teach in their area of competence. The teaching programs I've participated in were not particularly grounded in reality. But this is extremely unlikely to make things significantly better, because the cushy jobs for smart slackers (which is to say, the jobs where the main job is communicating information, rather than "community building and classroom management") already have adequate teachers. And that community building and classroom management is not particularly about intelligence. It's basically orthogonal to academic ability.
Those states aren't taking my suggestion -- night school to get a teaching certificate may seem like a trivial inconvenience, but it's a quite a bit higher bar than "submit a resume, criminal record check, and interview".
So which jobs are contributing to the teacher shortage? (real question, idk -- but if they are not focused around "communicating information" (aka "teaching") my instinct would be to eliminate those jobs -- et voila, shortage eliminated!
I would personally be fine with that, but unfortunately, "willing to put up with BS administrative tasks, which are often long and dull" is actually part of the job. Working in public schools is a long procession of trivial inconveniences.
Special education, bus drivers, custodians, less than full time positions, bilingual positions, educational assistants who make ~$20,000, normal teaching positions in the sort of school where the "students" are getting into knife fights, yelling down the teachers, throwing furniture at teachers, and the administrators are yelling at teachers in the hallway. Also some of the schools where the "students" can't speak English, but the teacher is teaching entirely in English. Maybe also some math and science, though the last time I've seen those positions going unfilled was quite some time.
I suspect that the deal with things like bus drivers and custodians is that they still have to pass a background check and be proven safe with kids, but there's no status, and they don't pay well. Educational assistant jobs also pay terribly, and they can be transferred to super unpleasant and sometimes dangerous one on one behavioral special education positions.
You might naively think "I am not a special education teacher, and so I would not have to teach special education students, about whom I know very little." This is not true. More than half the elementary classrooms have a couple of children in them who have pretty high support needs, need a great deal of individual attention, but won't get it, because there are also at least 20 other kids, simultaneously learning normal kid stuff. I'm not going to describe the people in question in too much detail here, but it can get rough. Especially since everybody has to be super vague about the situation.There are also a lot of "BIPs" now -- behavior action plans, which mean that every time the child acts badly, the teacher is punished by having to fill out a lot of forms (while they are "teaching" -- elementary teachers do not necessarily get a prep period every day), and the child is sent to the counselor for a doughnut or something.
The aggressive classrooms are self evident. I knew someone who became a professional dancer after having a desk thrown at here, and the district did not do anything about it, and the offender came right back. I knew a shop teacher who quit mid-year after a young person was running around with sharp tools and propane torches, but could not be removed from the class.
In one sense, there is a clear and obvious route to correcting these situations: perhaps it was unwise to make public schools the childcare/detention facility of last resort. Perhaps that shouldn't be the job of schools. Yet here we are. And the legislature could probably go ahead and say "anyone who can pas this fairly difficult test is free to teach," and that might be a good idea, but it will still not improve conditions, so it would still be a pretty hard sell outside of a couple years of idealism for most people who aren't committed enough to at least take a couple of night school classes while applying.
Edit: also, this https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/difference-between-tech-hiring-and-teacher-hiring/
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There are alternative certification programs that allow people who already hold a random bachelor's degree to to become teachers without going back to school for two years. I myself did the online, self-paced American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) program and found a position that way.
Alternatively, I could have gone to a local community college and completed their one-year, two-semester Educator Preparation Institute (EPI) program, but that would have been more expensive (I got the ABCTE program on sale for $1550, while 21 credits for seven courses would have come out to about $2500) and involved more work (ABCTE only required two high-stakes tests, one for the subject area and the other for pedagogy). Admittedly, the EPI programs include student teaching, while ABCTE does not. I was worried that the lack of field experience would hurt me, but I got an offer anyway.
I am aware -- two years seems like way to much of a barrier for somebody considering teaching as a fallback career. (I think there used to be a similar one year option in my jurisdiction, but it was eliminated by 'big teacher' or something. Ironically due to covid they were prepared to waive any of these requirements due to extreme shortages -- but you were capped at the bottom of the salary scale (like ~40k) and would be fired once the crisis resolved. So they definitely weren't attracting 'smart' people of any kind there.)
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That would not seem to address OP's concerns re improving the quality of education.
I am more qualified than the average high school teacher to teach any of math, physics, or computer science, at least -- I have a BSc, and therefore would need at least 2 years of indoctrination at the Education department before I would be allowed to teach high school in my jurisdiction.
I am a smart slacker, and could certainly get into earning ~80k p.a. for short days and summers off -- indeed I considered it prior to getting into remote software development. (yes I know most teachers do a lot of work outside of school hours -- they are not smart slackers)
But two more years of university is a bridge too far, so I find something else to do -- I submit that the population of people like me is much larger than the one that pursued teachers certificates -- so much so that even if there is no selection effect against being smart and nuanced in the teacher's certificate population, you would have many more such people considering teaching if you removed the need for an education diploma.
I hope this is clear?
Two more years is probably too long, and there's too damn much indoctrination going on, but in reality you can't just walk out of your college degree course and into a classroom and start teaching.
You can try, and this is the fun part of seeing student teachers doing practical work becasue the twenty or thirty eager little blossoms sitting before them in the classroom are quite likely to try and drive them crazy just for fun, but you do need practical instruction in pedagogical methods, supervision by experienced teachers, and learning how to control the little - darlings so they'll sit down, shut up, and learn something.
What about 10-20 years in industry? I would be an excellent CS teacher, and I'm quite sure I could wrangle math/physics to at the very least the low bar set by teaching diploma recipients who happened to take a couple of such courses at the 1-200 level during their four year indoctrination.
If you're talking about further/continuing education for adults, I'd agree. (Even 20 year olds might or might not be capable of sitting down, shutting up and learning).
But if we mean "average bunch of 12-15 year old kids, particularly boys" then nope. You can't use "your job depends on you not openly sassing your boss, which is me" against them to get them to sit down, shut up, and learn.
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Yes, I understand that your suggestion would increase the supply of teachers. But what I expressed skepticism about was that it would improve education. How is it that attracting slackers will improve education? I taught high school for many years, and there is no way that a slacker is going to be an effective teacher, with the possible exception of someone who is a genius.
I did specify smart slackers -- the goal is to provide some diversity of thought. Based on what I'm seeing with my kid that's going through this right now, this would be much more impactful than any 'quality' boost provided by teacher training. You think that I need two years of diploma to teach high school algebra? I'm already teaching it to my kid because his actual teachers seem to be failing miserably.
The teaching certificate may provide some sort of quality control, so you'd want to replace it with IQ and subject-matter tests (although those might be racist).
I (and probably gdanning) agree this would be a net benefit. But I think it'd close more like 5% of the gap between 'very intelligent teachers' and 'where we are now'. There are a four million teachers in the united states!
Also, why do we want very-smart teachers teaching not-smart students? It's probably better for 'society' that your time be used developing software, even if that software is p=.3 useful and p=.7 optimizing ads for video games or something.
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Again, my point is that slackers are unlikely to be effective teachers, so a "more slackers" policy is unlikely to improve education. I an not arguing for requiring teacher training. I am arguing against encouraging slackers to become teachers.
Eg: Bob teaches history. He requires students to write 10 papers per year. With 150 students and 10 minutes to grade each paper, that is 15000 minutes of grading per year. In contrast, Joe, a slacker, gives multiple choice scantron tests. Total grading time:3000 seconds. Which teacher would you choose for your kid?
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I think applying most of the solutions the teachers are overwhelmingly statistically likely to vote for/believe solve the problem will indeed solve it for them: a strictly enforced 50/50 gender split, intersectionality when it comes to disciplinary action and standards (but applied to men as well as women- this mostly translates to "no zero-tolerance policies, admin has to do the legwork" instead of the "man bad woman good" this term is generally corrupted into though), and the like.
This will generate a bunch of scandals since it's deliberately re-introducing the crime gender into schools and "muh racism", but as the last 20 years of gender ideology could be argued to demonstrate, women are just as good at molesting your kids as the men are (since everything they do, if it were a man doing it, would be considered as such). I suspect this is the path forward for people on the right (in their current definitions, continual exposure to men and the standards they tend to impose tends to make people more right-wing; vice versa for women and left-wing [their D+30something is kind of a big deal]); their problem is capitalizing on that win.
Really, the goal should be to make sure the "I just want kids to mother" women are encouraged to do that as the default, but in a way that can be meaningfully divorced from "Step 1: retvrn to 1950" and "Who are you to complain? This is literally what you've been asking for" is well within the capabilities of a sizeable minority to push.
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Then you have to fix the pipeline for teachers. Right now it's more or less the default path for people who are good at school but not smart enough to go into academia- this group is upper class, female, liberal, and selected for being midwits, and all they have to do to become teachers is not opt out at any point. Make teaching something that has to be opted in to, you'll get better teachers.
I don't understand what this means. A teacher, at least in public school, has to obtain a credential, which means completing a credential program. How is that not opting in.
"Going to college and becoming a teacher" is exactly what the public school system is geared towards having good students do. Just making the default decisions will wind up with becoming a teacher.
Again. I really don't understand. Surely, just making the default decisions leads to working for some corporation or another. Very few grads become teachers and, as noted, doing so usually requires extra schooling beyond a bachelor's degree. Which is not the case for most entry level post-college jobs.
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I’m a teacher in Canada, where salaries often top out around 105k CAD. Teachers here are also distressingly low-g, low curiosity, low nuance. Realistic raises aren’t going to fix it.
Raises combined with aptitude testing ought to do it, since then you get applicants who are both talented enough to be a good teacher/work elsewhere productively and are at least somewhat interested in teaching.
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I don't know much about Canada, but in Los Angeles, a teacher starts at 56K and can reach 98K with a doctorate and 14 years of experience. Meanwhile, the median starting salary for an attorney in Los Angeles is $121,000.
I didn't say anything about "realistic" raises. I referred to necessary raises.
ADA earn less.
https://www.biglawinvestor.com/district-attorney-salary/
Yes, everyone knows that some get paid less. That is why I referred to median salaries.
But, for the record, the salary range for a District Attorney III in Los Angeles County is 118,000 - 163,000 per year. Moreover, of the 1000 people listed here with the job title of district attorney, it looks like 700 made base pay of 125k plus, 600 made 150k plus, and 300 made 190k plus.
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Lawyers don't get summers off, don't get a pension and spend 3 extra years in school. Also the lawyer number is skewed upwards by big law that recruits from T14 schools and where you work insane hours, most people don't get that and will start closer $70k.
I knew someone would miss the point. The point is NOT that it is unfair that lawyers make more than teachers. The point is that, if we want to get smart people to go into teaching as a career, such as by retaining the Teach For America people I referred to, then we have to compensate them a lot better.
No, two extra years, because a teaching credential usually takes a year. And if you look at the salary schedule in the link, a teacher with 2 years of experience is making under 57K in Los Angeles. And, of course, many law students have summer clerkships which now have a median salary of more than $3000/wk for 10 weeks.
No, I cited the median salary, which unlike the mean, is not skewed by big law salaries.
Trying to get better teachers by increasing salaries is trying to push on a rope. You won't get better teachers; you'll get the same teachers with more money. You need to increase the standards first, and if and when you note that you're actually facing a shortage that is credibly due to compensation, only then increase salaries.
No, giving raises to current teachers will not improve teaching (Though my best HS math teacher, Mr. Gou5dge (the 5 was silent) left teaching for better pay in law). But increasing salaries for new teachers will. Eg, more of those TFA teachers I mentioned will stick with teaching,and more smart grads will opt for teaching instead of other careers.
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