2 posts tagged “education”

Over dinner this evening with a couple first-years on their way back from Oxford, where we each ordered huge, bloody steaks and whiskey, and where my view of whatever college basketball game happened to be showing on TV was obstructed by the three large boars’ heads mounted on the wall, the question came up as to whether we “believe in Teacher Corps.” My answer, anyway, is no. I don’t believe in Teacher Corps, not because it does no good at all, but because it is too minuscule for such an enormous problem. We have a problem with education in this country that we need to solve. Programs like Teacher Corps allow legislatures and the general public to salve their collective conscience, reassuring themselves that they are doing something about a problem which in fact requires several orders of magnitude more investment than they are willing to sacrifice. This is like that TV commercial where the engineer tries to patch a leak in a dam with a wad of gum, followed by the admonition, “Assuming you’ve done enough for retirement doesn’t make much sense either.” When public education fails, the apathy and selfish, conceited ignorance of the voting public is ultimately to blame, and no Mississippi Teacher Corps can solve the problem or absolve the responsibility.

I recently started a trial subscription to the Economist news magazine. I love it. It has none of the superficiality that turns me off to conventional news sources. No sensation. No celebrities. No news of the day. No unbearable bias. Just thorough, thoughtful analysis from an international perspective, the numbers, and the reasons behind the trends.

So this week's issue mentions the most recent international comparisons of school performance. Unfortunately, being a brief, rather than feature article, it lacked mention of the data-gathering and statistical methods used, but some of the observations remain intriguing, especially as confirms one of my favorite rallying cries: Get better teachers!

• A common factor among all the best performers is that teachers are drawn from the top ranks of graduates.
• In top-performing Finland, the differences between schools are nearly trivial.
• Across the world, the less students know about science, the more optimistic they are about the chances of solving the planet's environmental problems.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10251324