WW Plus: School Reform Ideas - Part 1

This week’s Wealth Weekly Plus focuses on school reform. While there will be partisans on both sides on the school reform issue, there is less disagreement that we have a problem to solve. Personally, I support public magnet and public charter schools. We'll get to that some other time. But here’s where I think we can start:

Teacher Accountability and Performance
President Barack Obama spoke in broad terms when talking about teacher accountability. It was a smart move on his part because both sides of the school reform issue felt he was taking their side. However, I’d like to dive right in. Listening to both sides of the accountability issue I’ve heard teachers say that the measures of accountability are too narrow, leading them to “teach to the test” because the primary measurement of performance is standardized tests.

So let’s add in other measures and weight them. Standardized test do need to be a part of the weighted system because grading is not the same across the country. From the New York Times:

The nation has a patchwork of standards that vary widely from state to state and a system under which he said “fourth-grade readers in Mississippi are scoring nearly 70 points lower than students in Wyoming — and they’re getting the same grade.” In addition, Mr. Obama said, several states have standards so low that students could end up on par with the bottom 40 percent of students around the globe.

This does not stem from a lack of money, but a lack of discipline. Standardized testing can identify what teaching methods are ineffective, but it shouldn’t be the primary focus of the teacher. The student should know how to think through unfamiliar, unconventional problems by using the knowledge they learned in their basic secondary school coursework. If they are taught about circumference and circle properties and cylinders, they should be able to find the volume of an tire inner tube given the right parameters.

So how do we reward our teachers? I'll try to cover that in the next post on this topic.