Fresh food? How quaint!

From Texas, a reminder that modern life has its downside. Apparently the children taken from that FLDS compound are headed for foster care, at least temporarily. And apparently the Texas child protection authorities have a long list of ways in which these children differ from most children in foster care: they're polite and modest. They're used to eating fresh vegetables from gardens they helped tend, and meat, eggs, and dairy products from animals they helped raise. Educationally, they're probably at least equal to and possibly ahead of students their age from public schools.

Regardless of whether the allegations against the FLDS are true, it ought to be possible for us all to agree that maybe their parents were doing something right. We're in a pretty sad state as a society when polite, educated children with healthy diets are seen as unusual.

No education system can exceed the quality of its teachers

"The only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction."

That's the key takeaway from a big McKinsey study (PDF file) on global education policy. Regardless of country, teacher quality has more impact on student performance than any other factor, including class size and per capita spending.

That's not exactly news. The interesting part of the study is its examination of best practices for improving instruction, both by recruiting better teachers in the first place and by developing the skills of teachers once they've been hired.

Paying for teacher performance

Most studies show that teacher quality directly correlates to the quality of a school. And so you see all kinds of proposals for beefed up licensing requirements, more stringent evaluation of teachers, easier removal of underperforming teachers, and on and on.

Now a charter school in Manhattan is testing a much simpler approach: if you want better teachers, pay them more. A lot more.

Makes sense to me. Better pay is presumed to attract better performers in every other profession, from computer programming and graphic arts to finance and athletics. Better pay makes it easier to give a job your full attention, which can only improve results. Perhaps even more important, people who make more money generally get more respect from both society and their employers. Friends of mine who've left teaching cite lack of respect as a very serious problem: it's hard to earn the respect of students if you don't get it from administrators or parents. It's hard to maintain educational or disciplinary standards when parents and administrators won't back you up.

Teaching the Best and Brightest

Education researchers and school systems invest enormous sums in figuring out the best ways to teach students with learning disabilities. Students at the far upper end of the IQ scale tend to get much less attention. They're smart, they'll do okay anywhere, right?

No, actually they won't. It turns out that gifted students have about the same dropout rate that students with learning disabilities do, probably due to boredom. Sometimes they blossom when they reach schools like MIT or Stanford, where they find peers for the first time in their lives, but sometimes they never get that far. Time explains the lost potential these kids represent, and considers ways to keep them from falling through the cracks.