Well, if “We knew it all along” as Hanushek and Raymond point out, we have sure taken our time understanding the implications. Accountability and actual teaching in education: a good thing. Without it, low-performing students don’t even begin to catch up to their grade peers. Thomas Sowell blames the education-as-a-self-teaching-process approach. This comes from educationists who are forever in some New Age of pedagogical theory.
Nevertheless, the current trend toward central direction and federalization of school policy is counter to the decentralized approach that works best in markets everywhere else. This is particularly true for services delivered locally (like schools), rather than nationally (like defense). As Eric Hanushek notes in an upcoming EducationNext article, student performance is unrelated to the insistent wailing and bleating for more school funds.
There are lessons and there are lessons here. Sure, teachers need a potential sanction to perform their job as expected–that’s what the evidence shows. So potential brickbats have some persuasive power. But as Hanushek, Raymond and others have long argued, bouquets of dollars thrown at the public education system make little educational difference whatever.
As for public education’s coming years, Chester Finn speculates on new ways to deliver public education, but I’m betting his ideas (hybrid schools with an emphasis on distance learning) won’t mesh well with No Child Left Behind, or the teacher employment goals of the National Education Association. Meanwhile, The Sinkhole Grows.
