I touched a raw nerve in my previous post on government schools. I've received mail from children of teachers, friends of teachers, spouses of teachers (but curiously, not teachers themselves), all dressing me down with various levels of geniality for my claim that teacher pay is overestimated based on their nine-month teaching schedule. I calculated that the average government school teacher makes $30 an hour; apparently the correct figure is roughly $2.25 an hour. None of the people who wrote to me argued that every teacher works this hard, but most insisted that I have dreadfully underestimated the number who do.

This reminds me of my favorite statistical axiom: the plural of "anecdote" ain't "data." But I have no data to argue against this claim of overwhelming teacher exertion, so let's assume that it is true (I don't doubt, in most cases, that the teachers with whom my letter writers are acquainted do in fact work as hard as claimed). This suggests dedication, which is laudable.

What it doesn't suggest is results. Simply put, we can spend a lot of time on something, and still not create much value. (Anyone who thinks otherwise should watch any of the movies Kevin Costner has directed.) And on this point the data is alarmingly clear -- U.S. government teachers not only fail to produce, as a whole, satisfactory educational results, but many of them are incapable of passing basic competency tests (see also this example, or this one, or choose from a pathetic buffet of examples). So something has to give -- either most teachers aren't working the twelve-hour days many of my writers asserted, or working a twelve-hour day doesn't necessarily lead to positive results.

I know the two objections. The first is straightforward, and many of you expressed it in your letters: we don't pay enough, so talented people don't teach. Perhaps that's true. But you should face the implication of your assertion. You are essentially admitting that most teachers are incompetent, the best you can get on the cheap. The policy implication is not that we should simply raise teacher pay, it is that we should fire all schoolteachers and then raise pay significantly, followed by the application of rigorous hiring standards. Even though government school advocates make the inadequate pay argument, I suspect that almost none of them pursue this argument to its logical conclusion.

The second objection is that inadequate resources, bad parenting, rules that inhibit discipline, and a host of other environmental factors mean that the heroic efforts of teachers translate only into a rear-guard action, for which we should be thankful. I believe there is much truth in this. Yet, there is one troubling and inescapable fact that belies this excuse: variability across classrooms. Some teachers in very bad environments regularly manage to outperform their peers, even those who work in better environments. So even if most teachers work very long hours, the inescapable truth is that some do a much better job of educating children than do the majority of their peers, despite laboring under the same adverse conditions. My wife, for example, routinely led her inner-city Detroit students to the 95th percentile and higher on their CAT tests (compared to a city-wide average in the mid-60's), without engaging in the cheating that is widespread and rarely reported, and without working the fourteen-hour days that many of my letter writers asserted.

Now, it is perhaps the case that removing the aforementioned negative factors would enable most teachers to do a competent job. This is by no means assured, however, because it is unclear that most teachers are adequately trained to do a competent job. Schools of Education are dominated by academic quacks who not only have no classroom experience, but no coherent theory or model of education either. Look at the syllabi and texts used in a college Education curriculum. Look at the curriculum vitae of the professors, and their journal articles. If you have the chance, listen to them lecture. Even if you have only a rudimentary knowledge of the practice (as opposed to the academic field and ideology) of education, this will be enough to generate alarm, if not revulsion. It is simply delusional to imagine that someone lacking both a theory of and experience at a task can train someone else, in a setting removed from that task, how to do the task himself.

Yet this is precisely what we assume, and so Colleges of Education turn out scores of students, who would have been better served studying an academic field, to be quasi-mentored by whomever happens to be teaching in the school to which they are assigned. In some instances this works well -- after wasting the bulk of four years on an Education degree, a young teacher has the good fortune to land among accomplished teachers from whom he learns a valuable practice. In many more instances, it seems, the young teacher simply learns an unvaluable practice -- how to ladle out pre-existing material to uninspired youngsters following a somewhat regular schedule and interspersed with periodic tests. This routine is loaded with paperwork and rote activity, workshops and summer courses, and tremendous stress from disciplinary problems. It is hard. When combined with what is perceived as low pay and what in some cases are terrible working conditions, it requires a dedication to children that is admirable. The expenditure of time and the possession of dedication do not guarantee, unfortunately, that students realize even a reasonable fraction of their potential.

And this is the real issue. Set aside abysmal performance on standardized tests. Most of us are tempted to look at government schools and conclude that because most students emerge able to read, do math, and regurgitate some minimal level of factual knowledge, that they have been properly educated. This is dreadfully myopic. Children are sponges, they soak up knowledge. Most of them have the capacity to learn multiple languages, to master musical instruments, to acquire mathematical, scientific, writing, and problem-solving skills far beyond what they acquire in twelve years of government schooling. Instead of capitalizing on this enormous innate potential, our methodology of schooling causes us to teach to the bottom third in rote, monotonous fashion. We have learned to be thankful when our children graduate able to read the newspaper and work a cash register; we should be furious that they know little of other languages, of science and math, of literary classics, of music, of their own civilization's history.

What is needed, beyond the reforms which took up the bulk of my last post (and which were overlooked by many readers who accused me of bashing teachers), are two things. First, we need good models of education. They exist, but they have been largely purged from or marginalized in Education curricula. Second, we need to abandon the notion that teachers can be taught by non-teachers in an environment removed from the actual practice of teaching children. This means adopting an extensive mentoring model, which is far more than the semester or two of student teaching that Education majors in most states currently must undergo. Don't expect the oversupply of Education Ph.D.'s to champion this idea, because it would mean exposing many of them as incompetent frauds.

I'm sure I've angered some of you. I hope you will recognize that a critique of the results and practices of the Education profession is not synonymous with a critique of you or your loved ones. As I mentioned before, my wife was one of those deviant teachers whose results were astronomically above the average. I say these things because I respect her and the teachers like her who accomplish much with little. This system is absolutely broken, and more money to do the same things will certainly not fix it. Good intentions don't teach children, good teachers do. And all of the evidence indicates that their numbers are frightfully small.