{"id":2456,"date":"2008-04-03T07:52:53","date_gmt":"2008-04-03T07:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/03\/better-teachers-cost-money\/"},"modified":"2008-04-03T07:52:53","modified_gmt":"2008-04-03T07:52:53","slug":"better-teachers-cost-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/03\/better-teachers-cost-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Better Teachers Cost Money"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Drum<\/a> points to a report comparing international education systems from McKinsey and Company<\/a> management consultants. The report (9.5 MB PDF)<\/a> does double duty: it serves as a useful and important contribution to the study of education reform, and also as a case study in how to use PowerPoint to generate documents that are well nigh unreadable– it’s tarted up with so many pointless graphics that it makes even FoxIt run annoyingly slow.<\/p>\n

Kevin’s got the key conclusions, though: if you want better schools, you need better teachers, and if you want better teachers, you need to make education a more attractive career choice:<\/p>\n

\n

School systems, from Seoul to Chicago, from London to New Zealand, and from Helsinki to Singapore, show that making teaching the preferred career choice depends less on high salaries or ‘culture’ than it does on a small set of simple but critical policy choices: developing strong processes for selecting and training teachers, paying good starting compensation, and carefully managing the status of the teaching profession.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Kevin has a graphic from the report that sums it up nicely: the average starting salary for a teacher in most of the world is around 95% of per capita GDP. In South Korea and Germany, who routinely clean our clocks in international tests, it’s 141% of per capita GDP. In the US, it’s 81% of per capita GDP.<\/p>\n

It’s as simple as that. Of course, the consultants at McKinsey are well-known communist sympathizers and union dupes, so this can safely be ignored.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Drum points to a report comparing international education systems from McKinsey and Company management consultants. The report (9.5 MB PDF) does double duty: it serves as a useful and important contribution to the study of education reform, and also as a case study in how to use PowerPoint to generate documents that are well… Continue reading Better Teachers Cost Money<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}