Today's Topic: Education

Maybe we would stop leaving children behind if we stopped leaving teachers behind.

Seriously.

Let's imagine for a moment that you knew a senior who was soon to be graduating from a top US university with amazing grades and hoards of companies vying to recruit them. One day, this person comes to you and says "I've decided I'm going to go become an elementary school teacher!" While you might laud their choice to their face, I bet deep down your gut reaction would be something like "what?!"

Education is important - more than important in fact - "vital" might even be a bit of an understatement. Education is the key to our future success. If we leave the children behind we leave all of us behind as the world moves forward. Blah blah blah...you've heard this all before and I'm sure you believe it. I believe it. So thank god we've introduced all this legislation making sure education is of a higher quality, right? That will be sure to fix the problem eventually, right?

Well, no, not really. Ask anyone in industry and they'll tell you that if you want to recruit an excellent candidate to a job, especially away from a job they already like (or that pays them really well, or both), you've got to make it appealing somehow (actually you shouldn't have to ask someone in industry - this should be intuitively obvious to anyone with an IQ above 50). Companies usually achieve this by offering the person more money than they were making in their last position, but occasionally these companies can capitalize on the glamor factor in a certain job (for example, for the number of hours they work, employees starting at major firms on Wall Street barely make above minimum wage, but there doesn't seem to be a lack of competition for those jobs).

Now you can hem and haw all you want about testing requirements and curricula for K-12 education, but the indisputable truth of the matter is that education is never going to be good if the teachers suck. So let's take a step back and think about the fact that we've got actual human beings deciding on a career path after graduating college, not little incarnations of Mother Teresa, and like all other human beings, these people respond to incentives.

Well good thing being a K-12 teacher is heavily incentivized! If the barely-living-wage salary doesn't get your blood pumping, then surely the complete lack of social capital will. Remember that super accomplished college graduate from the first paragraph? They are not a saint and deep down, the care what people think of them. As undesirable as it might be, the general opinions of society does not support Ivy League (or equivalent) graduates going and teaching in schools - they're supposed to go out and "make something of themselves," and culturally, schoolteaching does not accomplish this.

Maybe that wouldn't matter, though, if teachers were paid really well. After all, these students have college loan debts and want to start families and be able to afford nice things for the first time in their lives. They cannot do that as teachers.

The truth of the matter is that we will never be able to improve education until we properly incentivize smart people becoming teachers. Right now the best and the brightest are going to work on Wall Street or going to get MBAs, and no one is really trying to persuade them to do otherwise. Forget "No Child Left Behind" - we need a "No Teacher Left Behind" policy that makes sure that we can start recruiting bright minds to help mold more bright minds.

Of course, we could just keep giving kids lots of standardized tests, although somehow I don't think this will have quite the same effect.

Blog!

Hi everyone (well actually, as of this entry being published, no one is following my blog, so I suppose I should say "hey future readers!" or something...),

I have long resisted starting a blog. Blogging has always seemed vaguely narcissistic to me - why should I assume that people really want to hear what I have to say about everything? Am I really that intelligent or observant?

Then I remembered, this is the internet, so if you don't want to hear what I'm thinking on any given day or week, than you are under no obligation whatsoever to read my blog. For whatever reason, I am compelled to share various thoughts and ideas I have with the world, and I am doing so here.

And...here...we...go...