Theory vs. Practice vs. POWER

How To Fix American Education

I’m not sure exactly why, but the field of teacher education seems to have always been a petri dish of weird and unscientific pedagogical theories. Perhaps it’s because the developing minds of the young are such fascinating and fungible sponges, almost anything seem plausible. There’s also the extremely significant fact that all of the Utopian schemes born of the 20th century (Soviet communism, Maoism, Critical Theory) recognize that the ‘good society’ will only really blossom once the next generation are taught to think in entirely different ways. Education is political power in 20 years and cultural power in 10. It’s not a conspiracy theory to say that and to recognize that many activists and theorists in our country have been highly invested in the molding of education for this reason (rather than for any real concern about children, which these people have none).

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and decolonizing the classroom are two pedagogical efforts which are closely related (in their creation and continued application) to this association between education and utopian revolution. There are plenty of non-political teaching theories which are just bad though (as in ineffective). One example is ‘whole language’ reading and spelling instruction. We knew conclusively through data that this was a failing strategy for teaching children to read, much inferior to phonics-based instruction, 40 years ago. My elementary school in first grade was re-learning the lesson (I learned to read at home) but this instructional method is still very common in American schools! Another, newer development is the equity-centered restructuring of math education. You can read more about that here, but as the darkly comical cartoon below shows, the essence of equity-centered math (or equity-centered anything) is nearly always to flatten disparities between groups by harming or handicapping the high achievers. It’s very much a political vision in the spirit of the villains of Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut.

But I don’t have to get into any of that here! How best to teach kids in the classroom is rather a separate question from how to improve education for the average American child. The latter question is much more about funding, public policy, and hiring.

…And the results are in! Anyone who questions this data is probably either uninformed or being dishonest. This is an experiment which has been run in various ways, not just in the 12,000 school districts in the United States but in virtually every other country. Every country has some version of public education and many of them have multiple models.

To be sure, certain schools have special challenges. Living in a district where 90% of the boys have no father in their home, or being a public school in Brownsville, Texas in 2024, overwhelmed by immigration and insufficiently aided by the federal government; these are issues which won’t be ameliorated by the simply program I’m about to lay out. But even in these schools the program should help. Roland Fryer is an extremely well-respected economist who grew up black in one of the suburban ghettoes which dot our landscape. His conclusions were unpalatable to certain activists and so (despite being the most brilliant economists of his generation, as well as a black man) he was ‘read out’ of the field by activists and hasn’t been able to go to work at his place of employment for several years… but that’s a story for another day. He did extensive and well-analyzed applied studies of education in Harlem (the kind of studies those activists would be doing if they were really interested in solving the problem) and his results only emphasized, in bold, that which was already known:

1.) You must pay teachers enough and give them enough social status that the best and brightest and most energetic members of society will consider education, if they have an intellectual or public-spirited bent. They should not be starting at a wage that’s half what they could earn in other fields. In the United States this would be around $80,000 per year, and more in the cities.

This policy recommendation is heartily endorsed by the teachers’ unions and therefore by the modern Left.

2.) You must evaluate teachers for effectiveness and ruthlessly cull those who aren’t measuring up. Teaching should be a competitive and results-oriented enterprise. This isn’t rocket science. If you have a team of screenwriters and you decide to pay them much more generously you might gain a marginal increase in quality but the benefit of offering higher pay is to attract better employees. As Dr. Fryer realized, a huge number of teachers in the United States are dead weight, probably better used at a Fed Ex store, and only staying in the field for the pension and summer vacations. Teachers don’t like to hear this for they don’t recognize any slack in their colleagues. I sympathize-I remember my K-12 teachers being uniformly excellent (although I was generally attending very good public schools). The fact is that higher wages wouldn’t have much effect on teaching unless it could entice better people into the profession, and those better teachers should mostly be replacing the bad ones. How to measure a ‘great’ teacher and a ‘bad’ teacher is not as settled but it’s a moot point here.

This policy recommendation is furiously resisted by the teachers’ unions. When cuts to education are dictated by the state government (usually) they usually fall on the most recent hires, who are often the most motivated and energetic teachers! It has long been observed that unions are basically cartels which gain money at the expense of employers, consumers, and other people who would like to work in the field in question.

Teachers’ unions in the United States would rather stay at their current paltry wages than receive generous pay increases, but be evaluated and compete with one another. In many cities the teachers’ unions are nearly unstoppable politically (look at the recent LAUSD contract for an example of this).

Teachers’ unions are now trying to erode the curriculum (through equity-centered math ‘reforms’ and other measures) and to neutralize standardized testing and other mathematical reflections of their widespread ineptitude.

There are other, related, policy changes which must be made. Administrators (all making 6 figure salaries) have increased threefold in the US public education system in the past 20 years while the number of teachers has barely increased. Nevertheless, this is not a difficult or a contentious subject among earnest people who know the data (and it’s extremely important for our society):

If you want to improve education across the board in the United States pay teachers better and fire bad ones. That’s it.