Links for 04/16/10

Forrest Hinton

if our society wants to cultivate outstanding teachers from the achiever class, it has to begin to put the right incentives in place for these smart, ambitious people to join the profession. This involves increased compensation that is based on achievement, changed images and demographics of teachers, opportunities to advance while in the classroom, and, yes, some much-needed, healthy competition.

Today, the public policy decisions our society has made force our schools to recruit too many teachers who, frankly, want stability, do not take risks, and aren’t interested in improving their profession. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t terrific teachers out there; it means that there aren’t nearly enough

Louise Tickle

a new breed of high-achieving students who have looked hard at what higher education has to offer and decided that the innovative new courses available at their local further education college are plenty good enough.

if high-achieving non-graduates are now able to get the same type of job as those who have a degree, why is higher education still seen as the be-all and end-all?

Chad Aldeman:

The chances of any one student getting into any one school will become smaller and smaller, even as the number of spaces at those schools keeps pace with demographic changes. The spaces themselves are not becoming more scarce; it’s the admissions craze that’s making them look that way.

they would have to accept that the admissions process is no longer about crafting the perfect freshman class as if each student was a Lego piece in a giant, fragile sculpture that would collapse without the perfect amount of Florida students, or oboists, or whatever else.

Students would apply to this third-party unit and list their preferences in order, and then a calculation would be run that would place students and fill school slots