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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (133386)	2/22/2001 3:08:02 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1570917

Yet it is essential that these positions be filled with qualified people. The free market has no mechanism for doing so. It requires conscious intervention by the citizenry to ensure those jobs get done. And obviously the job of teaching children is not getting done in this country. The job is not getting done under the current non-free market in education so this means that allowing a more free market would have to be a mistake? Parents want there children to be educated. They would pay for this except that it is all ready paid for through their taxes. You could have a more free market either by having it paid for completely privately (which wont happen), or by having the government payments go to the parents to pay for school and allowing the schools to compete for these payments. This does not directly answer the question of teacher pay because they could get underpaid vouchers or not, but it is a way to allow competition in to education. The biggest drawback is the fact that measuring how well teachers teach is difficult. You can have standardized tests, and I think they are a good idea, but they are limited. A good teacher starting off with poor students will have students with lower scores then a slightly worse teacher that had more capable students but the 2nd teacher would score better if you are just looking at test results. Also too much reliance on tests can lead teachers to teach the test rather then teaching the subject. Even this can be an improvement for those that were receiving really bad teaching (assuming the teachers can even teach the the test competently), but it probably is not a good thing for most students. I think if we did have a good way to immediately measure teachers performance then not only would the education of the students improve but teachers on the average would probably get paid a bit more (and the best teachers might make a lot more). Tim