Take away their commutes - give teachers housing in the same community as their students. Pay their rents, their student debts, their day care costs - take away their worry of the mundane so that they can get on with the importance business of raising our children with us.
Count me in on the asset based orientation work! It’s 100% critical.
Before driving off with the stacks in your Odyssey, drop some $$ to benefit the new teacher experience. One of the aspects to improve teaching workplace can be to allow time in master teacher’s schedules to mentor year 1-3 teachers. True collaboration and support. The current sink or swim model is not working.
My first year, I adopted a mentor teacher, she did not volunteer, I just showed up every morning in her class after pouring hours into my lesson plans the night before. She helped me refine my teacher moves and knew “Tom” in my class and how I could anticipate and support his needs with my plan. Her class was where I went to reflect and maybe cry after the lesson bombed and to celebrate the little wins. That mentor teacher was my lifeline yet I don’t think many have that opportunity.
Surely, a few million could allow us to test it out?
My interests have to do with keeping teachers in the profession as long as possible. The beat teachers are the ones that stick around and I think we underplay that the causality on that is backwards.
I barely survived my first few years. I then learned what works best and how to make this sustainable. I feel really good about my efficacy now but I saw a whole lot of people leave the profession before they got to the point I'm at.
CZI (Meta's philanthropic arm) actually funds some work on #1. They invest in The Teaching Well, a non-profit with this as their guiding philosophy: "Healthy people heal systems and healthy systems heal people." Their mission is to "reconnect educators with their brilliance, their bodies, and their relationships so that they can continue to serve their communities." I suspect they haven't put $100M into TTW, but I think they've at least tipped a few million their direction.
Strong concur with the first item on your list. Changing the material conditions under which the work of teaching and learning is done has always struck me as the most efficacious place to put money. I think this goes beyond just raising salaries, but it would interesting to see what raising salaries to the $60k minimum the Teacher Salary Project promotes might do.
As for personalized and social, I think of my grade school education in the 1970s, early 1980s in a Chicago suburb where our classes were run on the "open education" principles of the time. We might have three or four different math or language arts textbooks being used by different students in the same class, where we would progress from one to the next as the teacher judged us ready. I was a big reader/language arts kid so I actually ran out of curriculum by 6th grade so my teacher designed work for me around reading Newberry medalist books and also helping first and second graders learn to read. I was tutoring on phonics! We mixed working independently and collaboratively throughout the day.
I know that there's lots of downsides with open education and reasons why it was abandoned and I don't know how well it worked for the full swath of my classmates, but I thought it was great. Far superior to what I'd go on to experience in middle and high school.
This is a fun thought experiment. I generally like your ideas. Two thoughts:
Here's a free idea: get rid of the high stakes in high stakes testing. At my school last year we were told very clearly by the principal at the time that we were making a decision we knew wasn't in the best interest of students and learning because he was under pressure from higher-ups to raise test scores. That's not only bad for students, it's demoralizing. I just learned a teacher friend is looking at other options after a similar "shit rolls downhill" moment where admin is putting pressure on teachers in obviously bad ways because of the push to raise test scores. I think this has clear educational benefits: less time on testing, less teaching time wasted trying to teach to the test, less demoralization of teachers, lower teacher turnover. You can use the $100 million to bribe some Pearson execs not to lobby against it.
Connected to the last one: I like your ideas for curriculum-based PD and asset orientation work. I think they would have a ton of value if you could get teachers engaged in that PD at scale. Here's the puzzle for me: there's not a good incentive for PD to be good. Lots of PD providers got into the job because they didn't like teaching or they are ladder climbers or whatever, not because they're the best for the job. (There are plenty of great ones, but they are far outnumbered by mediocre consultants. There are teachers in every school in the country with untapped potential for delivering PD who just like teaching better or don't know how to get into the game.) Admin don't actually need PD to be good, they need to do something that sounds nice to the district level folks. High admin turnover, pressure to raise test scores, and the constant parade of fads have conditioned teachers to ignore PD because it's typically not very good, and even when it's good that initiative often gets forgotten the next year. So here the $100 million is to somehow convince districts to drop other low-value PD. Say "hey we're done throwing random stupid stuff at you and we're also going to cut a bunch of administrative garbage from your plate. But for every five hours of dumb stuff we take off your plate, we're going to ask you to do one hour of something we think is better, and we will stick with."
DK!!! - So fun to see you here and -- as someone intimately familiar with the same district you mention above -- I agree. Your bribery scheme is intriguing; your second idea to improve PD large scale is spot on. How do we make PD a durable investment? And how to do that in the context of continual teacher (and admin) turnover.
5. Sounds like you need to go back to your early compelling image construction days and snap pics of yourself with different amounts of cash in your hands. (Actually - an AI could probably make a series of fun photos). "Which picture shows the amount of cash that will fit in Mr. Meyer's Odyssey?" Way better than "will this shot go in", my man.
4. Not sure I understand you here - is the following an example of "oh other learners are here too"? We have used Flipgrid very well, particularly for assessments that are verbal. On a speech unit last year we assigned kids to deliver a different 60 second segment of their speech over the course of a few homework assignments, as well as view what classmates posted. Then the teachers were able to give their own expert feedback to each student.
1. You'd need to find a way to account for the obvious factor of social class, but don't private schools essentially have all those factors? I stumbled into private teaching early on and have always been lucky to take these features for granted. It sure does make my life as a teacher a lot easier. I wonder - what's the turnover rate like in independent schools? Has anyone looked closer into this?
$100M isn't enough to really change education IMO. Use that $100M to leverage $100B in additional annual federal funding for schools to reduce teacher load. Give us what we've always been asking, more time to plan, fewer students, more time for real individualized education.
Re: #4, I'm currently playing Super Mario Wonder, and when you connect online you see the ghosts and shadows of other players in the level with you. Ghosts are real-time - that player is in the level at the same time as you. Now, you're both playing individually and need to beat the level yourselves, but you can see each other and occasionally help each other out (they can revive you if you die, or place markers in key areas). Shadows are records of past gameplay - they are not actively there, but you can still see them. And it can make you think, "How did they get over there?" But now you know it's POSSIBLE to get over there, and so you try.
This sounds a lot like what you're imagining for social but personalized learning, and I would love to see that in action.
Teachers' working conditions, including their own learning conditions are significant drivers of frustration, burnout and turnover. I'd love to see scaling personalized learning for teachers as well, including each teacher having access to a non-evaluative instructional coach to support implementation of their learning. Full disclosure... I'm totally biased here as I've launched Ribbit Learning to do just this.
If I correctly understand your categories, it seems like that empty social-personalized quadrant is occupied by video game companies and the like, and maybe also by some immersive art/tech experiences, like Meow Wolf. I feel like people designing online education systems have a lot to learn from such experiences. Your question also brings to mind the HOMAGO (Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out) model of Mimi Ito and others. This ethnographic model gives a structure to understand the tremendous amounts of learning that go on as kids interact with peers and develop mastery of tech such as video games, solving complex problems through social interaction in tech-mediated spaces. It has been used to develop some outstanding spaces for after-school teen learning (YouMedia in the Chicago Public Library, and ArtLab+ at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC). Ito is very careful to limit her interpretation to the scope of her studies (technology use by teens), but I have seen very similar processes at work in other learning environments, other areas of study, and other age groups. I think further investigation of the application of this model to formal education is worthy of some of your hypothetical millions.
The social personalized learning quadrant is definitely a “Blue Ocean” to explore for Edtech companies. Your suggestion about developing an asset orientation is super interesting, thanks for pointing that out. It would be great to explore these ideas with a randomized trial but you risk wasting your $100M by failing to find a significant effect size, just like Zuckerberg.
Freddie Deboer presents some really bleak evidence here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work about the lack of a class size effect, also about teacher training. He says that “Teacher quality perhaps exists but likely exerts far less influence than generally believed”. As other comments point out, private schools enjoy some improvements to teacher working conditions but according to DeBoer, when you adjust for differences in ability, attending these schools makes no difference (not one you'll find in a randomized trial). I wish your hypothetical trials could find brighter results!
What would happen if the teacher was a coach and there were no artificial lines between subjects? One of the things that has always driven me crazy and that spurred an endowment I made to education is that learning "structure" follows the money (Math has a budget, History has a budget...). That factory-based approach with an associated accounting model creates artificial silos across subject matter. I believe that humans are innately curious (hopefully we have more lives than cats do), and I believe that when we are trying to solve a problem that is relevant to us, are given tools to use (knowledge included), and have other people to ideate with, not only do we learn more, we also solve the problems in creative and useful ways. In today's world, imho, cross-disciplinary problem solving is an absolutely critical life and professional skill.
I was genuinely interested in your response and enjoyed reading through all the ideas... that asset orientation piece needs some legs, somewhere. Here's hoping. Working conditions/learning conditions is another thing I spend a ton of time thinking about - I think there are ways to make this more cost neutral with some small tweaks. I spend time on master schedules trying to find cost neutral ways to make teachers lives make more sense at school (fewer classes to prep, fewer singletons, protected chunks of prep). Thanks for the post - leaving me much to think about.
Sincerest apologies for typo-ing your first name (fixed now) and sincerest thanks for the interesting question. At first I was like, nah, too hard, not gonna answer that. But when you're trying to psyche yourself up to post every week, you can't afford to turn down inspiration when it strikes like that!
I think about things like that all the time ... my Dad has played the lottery a ton (I know, I know... math/odds, what have you) but it has often led to ridiculous conversations about how to spend money like that... I often think about education.
One path might be creating a roughly fixed $ amount for comparison purposes.
A middle or HS math teacher with 5 classes per day, who goes down to 4 per day, creates need for 0.25 more FTE. Here in Boston an FTE is pretty expensive (*~$100k + 30k retirement and benefits), so $32,500, but obviously it varies widely across USA.
It frees up 1 concrete period per day, plus whatever the additional out of class time is to prep for that class.
You could then assess impact of....
a) Using the freed up class for more planning time
b) Using the freed up class for more collaboration time
c) Keeping 5 classes per day, but ~1 or 2 fewer students in each class - so Class Size reduction that equals $32,500
d) The mega package curriculum PD you describe in #3 (not sure that 12 days of coverage plus the PD itself adds up to $32,500 but that's not a crazy cost parameter)
e) $32,500 higher salary?
f) $32,500 "Donors Choose on Steroids" discretionary fund for individual teachers
My first years teaching were at .8 FTE (in a private international school in Hong Kong). We were very clearly and obviously on a separate salary track, making less than .25 of a Boston FTE :). It was modeled on the British designation of an NQT (newly qualified teacher) - they don't expect teachers with a degree to be able to sink or swim but have them teach less and be mentored more. I've always wondered if that model could be adopted widely. (Or maybe it's just America that is odd and backwards here...)
Take away their commutes - give teachers housing in the same community as their students. Pay their rents, their student debts, their day care costs - take away their worry of the mundane so that they can get on with the importance business of raising our children with us.
Count me in on the asset based orientation work! It’s 100% critical.
Before driving off with the stacks in your Odyssey, drop some $$ to benefit the new teacher experience. One of the aspects to improve teaching workplace can be to allow time in master teacher’s schedules to mentor year 1-3 teachers. True collaboration and support. The current sink or swim model is not working.
My first year, I adopted a mentor teacher, she did not volunteer, I just showed up every morning in her class after pouring hours into my lesson plans the night before. She helped me refine my teacher moves and knew “Tom” in my class and how I could anticipate and support his needs with my plan. Her class was where I went to reflect and maybe cry after the lesson bombed and to celebrate the little wins. That mentor teacher was my lifeline yet I don’t think many have that opportunity.
Surely, a few million could allow us to test it out?
My interests have to do with keeping teachers in the profession as long as possible. The beat teachers are the ones that stick around and I think we underplay that the causality on that is backwards.
I barely survived my first few years. I then learned what works best and how to make this sustainable. I feel really good about my efficacy now but I saw a whole lot of people leave the profession before they got to the point I'm at.
CZI (Meta's philanthropic arm) actually funds some work on #1. They invest in The Teaching Well, a non-profit with this as their guiding philosophy: "Healthy people heal systems and healthy systems heal people." Their mission is to "reconnect educators with their brilliance, their bodies, and their relationships so that they can continue to serve their communities." I suspect they haven't put $100M into TTW, but I think they've at least tipped a few million their direction.
Strong concur with the first item on your list. Changing the material conditions under which the work of teaching and learning is done has always struck me as the most efficacious place to put money. I think this goes beyond just raising salaries, but it would interesting to see what raising salaries to the $60k minimum the Teacher Salary Project promotes might do.
As for personalized and social, I think of my grade school education in the 1970s, early 1980s in a Chicago suburb where our classes were run on the "open education" principles of the time. We might have three or four different math or language arts textbooks being used by different students in the same class, where we would progress from one to the next as the teacher judged us ready. I was a big reader/language arts kid so I actually ran out of curriculum by 6th grade so my teacher designed work for me around reading Newberry medalist books and also helping first and second graders learn to read. I was tutoring on phonics! We mixed working independently and collaboratively throughout the day.
I know that there's lots of downsides with open education and reasons why it was abandoned and I don't know how well it worked for the full swath of my classmates, but I thought it was great. Far superior to what I'd go on to experience in middle and high school.
This is a fun thought experiment. I generally like your ideas. Two thoughts:
Here's a free idea: get rid of the high stakes in high stakes testing. At my school last year we were told very clearly by the principal at the time that we were making a decision we knew wasn't in the best interest of students and learning because he was under pressure from higher-ups to raise test scores. That's not only bad for students, it's demoralizing. I just learned a teacher friend is looking at other options after a similar "shit rolls downhill" moment where admin is putting pressure on teachers in obviously bad ways because of the push to raise test scores. I think this has clear educational benefits: less time on testing, less teaching time wasted trying to teach to the test, less demoralization of teachers, lower teacher turnover. You can use the $100 million to bribe some Pearson execs not to lobby against it.
Connected to the last one: I like your ideas for curriculum-based PD and asset orientation work. I think they would have a ton of value if you could get teachers engaged in that PD at scale. Here's the puzzle for me: there's not a good incentive for PD to be good. Lots of PD providers got into the job because they didn't like teaching or they are ladder climbers or whatever, not because they're the best for the job. (There are plenty of great ones, but they are far outnumbered by mediocre consultants. There are teachers in every school in the country with untapped potential for delivering PD who just like teaching better or don't know how to get into the game.) Admin don't actually need PD to be good, they need to do something that sounds nice to the district level folks. High admin turnover, pressure to raise test scores, and the constant parade of fads have conditioned teachers to ignore PD because it's typically not very good, and even when it's good that initiative often gets forgotten the next year. So here the $100 million is to somehow convince districts to drop other low-value PD. Say "hey we're done throwing random stupid stuff at you and we're also going to cut a bunch of administrative garbage from your plate. But for every five hours of dumb stuff we take off your plate, we're going to ask you to do one hour of something we think is better, and we will stick with."
Love these ideas. Chaotic good.
DK!!! - So fun to see you here and -- as someone intimately familiar with the same district you mention above -- I agree. Your bribery scheme is intriguing; your second idea to improve PD large scale is spot on. How do we make PD a durable investment? And how to do that in the context of continual teacher (and admin) turnover.
In reverse order...
5. Sounds like you need to go back to your early compelling image construction days and snap pics of yourself with different amounts of cash in your hands. (Actually - an AI could probably make a series of fun photos). "Which picture shows the amount of cash that will fit in Mr. Meyer's Odyssey?" Way better than "will this shot go in", my man.
4. Not sure I understand you here - is the following an example of "oh other learners are here too"? We have used Flipgrid very well, particularly for assessments that are verbal. On a speech unit last year we assigned kids to deliver a different 60 second segment of their speech over the course of a few homework assignments, as well as view what classmates posted. Then the teachers were able to give their own expert feedback to each student.
1. You'd need to find a way to account for the obvious factor of social class, but don't private schools essentially have all those factors? I stumbled into private teaching early on and have always been lucky to take these features for granted. It sure does make my life as a teacher a lot easier. I wonder - what's the turnover rate like in independent schools? Has anyone looked closer into this?
$100M isn't enough to really change education IMO. Use that $100M to leverage $100B in additional annual federal funding for schools to reduce teacher load. Give us what we've always been asking, more time to plan, fewer students, more time for real individualized education.
Re: #4, I'm currently playing Super Mario Wonder, and when you connect online you see the ghosts and shadows of other players in the level with you. Ghosts are real-time - that player is in the level at the same time as you. Now, you're both playing individually and need to beat the level yourselves, but you can see each other and occasionally help each other out (they can revive you if you die, or place markers in key areas). Shadows are records of past gameplay - they are not actively there, but you can still see them. And it can make you think, "How did they get over there?" But now you know it's POSSIBLE to get over there, and so you try.
This sounds a lot like what you're imagining for social but personalized learning, and I would love to see that in action.
Teachers' working conditions, including their own learning conditions are significant drivers of frustration, burnout and turnover. I'd love to see scaling personalized learning for teachers as well, including each teacher having access to a non-evaluative instructional coach to support implementation of their learning. Full disclosure... I'm totally biased here as I've launched Ribbit Learning to do just this.
If I correctly understand your categories, it seems like that empty social-personalized quadrant is occupied by video game companies and the like, and maybe also by some immersive art/tech experiences, like Meow Wolf. I feel like people designing online education systems have a lot to learn from such experiences. Your question also brings to mind the HOMAGO (Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out) model of Mimi Ito and others. This ethnographic model gives a structure to understand the tremendous amounts of learning that go on as kids interact with peers and develop mastery of tech such as video games, solving complex problems through social interaction in tech-mediated spaces. It has been used to develop some outstanding spaces for after-school teen learning (YouMedia in the Chicago Public Library, and ArtLab+ at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC). Ito is very careful to limit her interpretation to the scope of her studies (technology use by teens), but I have seen very similar processes at work in other learning environments, other areas of study, and other age groups. I think further investigation of the application of this model to formal education is worthy of some of your hypothetical millions.
The social personalized learning quadrant is definitely a “Blue Ocean” to explore for Edtech companies. Your suggestion about developing an asset orientation is super interesting, thanks for pointing that out. It would be great to explore these ideas with a randomized trial but you risk wasting your $100M by failing to find a significant effect size, just like Zuckerberg.
Freddie Deboer presents some really bleak evidence here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work about the lack of a class size effect, also about teacher training. He says that “Teacher quality perhaps exists but likely exerts far less influence than generally believed”. As other comments point out, private schools enjoy some improvements to teacher working conditions but according to DeBoer, when you adjust for differences in ability, attending these schools makes no difference (not one you'll find in a randomized trial). I wish your hypothetical trials could find brighter results!
What would happen if the teacher was a coach and there were no artificial lines between subjects? One of the things that has always driven me crazy and that spurred an endowment I made to education is that learning "structure" follows the money (Math has a budget, History has a budget...). That factory-based approach with an associated accounting model creates artificial silos across subject matter. I believe that humans are innately curious (hopefully we have more lives than cats do), and I believe that when we are trying to solve a problem that is relevant to us, are given tools to use (knowledge included), and have other people to ideate with, not only do we learn more, we also solve the problems in creative and useful ways. In today's world, imho, cross-disciplinary problem solving is an absolutely critical life and professional skill.
I was genuinely interested in your response and enjoyed reading through all the ideas... that asset orientation piece needs some legs, somewhere. Here's hoping. Working conditions/learning conditions is another thing I spend a ton of time thinking about - I think there are ways to make this more cost neutral with some small tweaks. I spend time on master schedules trying to find cost neutral ways to make teachers lives make more sense at school (fewer classes to prep, fewer singletons, protected chunks of prep). Thanks for the post - leaving me much to think about.
Sincerest apologies for typo-ing your first name (fixed now) and sincerest thanks for the interesting question. At first I was like, nah, too hard, not gonna answer that. But when you're trying to psyche yourself up to post every week, you can't afford to turn down inspiration when it strikes like that!
I think about things like that all the time ... my Dad has played the lottery a ton (I know, I know... math/odds, what have you) but it has often led to ridiculous conversations about how to spend money like that... I often think about education.
I like your teacher conditions RCT.
One path might be creating a roughly fixed $ amount for comparison purposes.
A middle or HS math teacher with 5 classes per day, who goes down to 4 per day, creates need for 0.25 more FTE. Here in Boston an FTE is pretty expensive (*~$100k + 30k retirement and benefits), so $32,500, but obviously it varies widely across USA.
It frees up 1 concrete period per day, plus whatever the additional out of class time is to prep for that class.
You could then assess impact of....
a) Using the freed up class for more planning time
b) Using the freed up class for more collaboration time
c) Keeping 5 classes per day, but ~1 or 2 fewer students in each class - so Class Size reduction that equals $32,500
d) The mega package curriculum PD you describe in #3 (not sure that 12 days of coverage plus the PD itself adds up to $32,500 but that's not a crazy cost parameter)
e) $32,500 higher salary?
f) $32,500 "Donors Choose on Steroids" discretionary fund for individual teachers
My first years teaching were at .8 FTE (in a private international school in Hong Kong). We were very clearly and obviously on a separate salary track, making less than .25 of a Boston FTE :). It was modeled on the British designation of an NQT (newly qualified teacher) - they don't expect teachers with a degree to be able to sink or swim but have them teach less and be mentored more. I've always wondered if that model could be adopted widely. (Or maybe it's just America that is odd and backwards here...)