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Politics : Socialized Education - Is there abetter way? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (228)	11/2/2007 7:19:34 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1513

You get systems that bad, when the system continues no matter what it does. ------- Free to fail 02 Nov 2007 02:55 pm One thing that strikes me about the arguments I've been having with voucher opponents is just how little they seem to understand how markets work. Markets don't work because they get it right the first time; they succeed because if at first they don't succeed, they try, try again. A public school, by and large, cannot fail. If it screws up, no matter how badly, we will continue pouring money into it. This is particularly true because most of the employees of most systems can't fail either. They can be atrocious at their jobs, but provided that they are not actually molesting the students, it's nearly impossible to get rid of them. Failure, to put it bluntly, works. Failure is nature's way of telling you "Hey, that doesn't work!" The American economy is vastly strengthened by the fact that companies are allowed to fail--and also by the fact that our crazy culture encourages us to try things that don't work. In the first few iterations, this often looks inferior to a centralized system. Look, the critics say, they sat down and planned it all! Compare that to our messy, fragmented market where half the stuff doesn't work! It can take a decade or more before the cracks in the planning appear. The planners, it turns out, didn't foresee that the world would change, and now the giant, planned system can't cope. One no longer hears so many complaints about how American cell services suck compared to Europe--not since their 3G debacle. I am fairly optimistic that in ten years, the current whinging about America's high-speed internet networks will be quieted when the decentralized model produces some unforeseen improvement. At a conference last year, I saw an incredibly compelling presentation from the guy who does usability for Treo. He talked about design philosophy, and showed slides of a project he does where he goes into various institutions, divides people into groups, gives them spaghetti and some tape, and asks them to build the tallest self-supporting structure they can. The worst-performing group, you'll be unsurprised to hear, was MBA students; they spend all their time arguing about who will be boss. Engineers do okay. But the best performing group? Kindergarten students. The students don't plan anything. They just try stuff, and if it doesn't work, they try something else. The presenter's argument was that if you want to do something quickly, and well, you need to have a lot of failure. Failure is the quickest way to learn. But the way public schools are set up, they can't really fail--and so they don't succeed at the hardest task we've given them. The schools are not set up to learn; they're set up to follow the rules, and to serve their customer base, who are not in the case of poor schools the parents, but the various people who work for the system. Ezra wrote a post criticizing my position on vouchers because there are, you know, really serious experts who care about education, and have all these awesome plans, and why the hell would we listen to some ideological libertarian whack job who just worships the market? I'd argue that first, all those plans suffer the fatal flaw of having to assume away all the poisonous interactions between the various constituents that have so far doomed school reform; second, they suffer the fatal flaw that the educational experts never fail either, because they just claim their plans weren't tried; and third, that serious planning may not be the right way to go about this. The right way may be to let a lot of people try stuff to see what works . . . and let a lot of other people copy what works because they're afraid of losing their jobs. While it's true that I think vouchers are good even if they just let a few kids exit an awful system, I also think it's true that they are the best shot we have at improving the system. meganmcardle.theatlantic.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (228)	11/6/2007 2:17:14 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1513

Not the Wizard of the Westwood, But the Master Teacher The best book I have ever read on the importance of teaching, and how to do it, is probably Swen Nater and Ronald Gallimore's You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching Principles and Practices. John Wooden is arguably the greatest college basketball coach of all time. He is often referred to as "The Wizard of the Westwood" because of his amazing record of 10 NCAA championships at UCLA. But what captures the imagination in reading this book is Wooden's approach to teaching --- whether it was HS English or how to break down a set of offensive skills on the basketball court. I have been a fairly successful teacher --- reasonably popular classroom teacher as reflected in teaching evaluations, and I have had students from every school I taught at that had me decide to become professional economists and thus pursue their PhDs in the discipline after exposure to my classes. And, my PhD students have done well and gone into teaching and research careers themselves. But I have also had several years of frustration with teaching and my ability to reach students. To me, Wooden explained why my approach to teaching during some periods worked and others it seemingly led to nothing but frustration. It is a challenge to try to stick to the teaching principles that work, rather than to succumb to incentives that lead to frustration. There are 11 common characteristics of good teachers: (1) they make learning engaging; (2) they have a passion for the subject; (3) they possess deep subject knowledge; (4) they are organized; (5) they are intense; (6) they recognize students for even minor progress; (7) they treat all with respect; (8) they are fair; (9) they believe all students are natural learners; (10) everyone knows implicitly that they like working with students; and (11) they place a priority on individual learning. The book ends with a discussion of Wooden's notion that teaching is a moral profession. He believed that the teacher had a moral obligation to be an example to his students. A poem Wooden often recited goes as follows: "No written word, no spoken plea can teach our youth what they should be. Nor all the books on all the shelves, it's what the teachers are themselves."... austrianeconomists.typepad.com