Easy. Fuck the union. Make it a system where you can get fired if you don't do well. Base pay on performance, not seniority.

What's that you say? Performance evals might not be fair? Welcome to every other business in America. Deal with it. If the manager doesn't give you good evals, find another company (district). If you move from district to district and keep getting crappy evals, guess what? The problem is YOU.

Likewise, if parents hate your school so much that they are willing to drive 2 hours into another district, guess what? Your school should go "bankrupt", just like companies do. Not your fault you say? Tough place to run a school? Good. Find another district.

So the district has no school, or the school always sucks? Guess what. It's not a problem with the administrators OR the teachers. It's your city. It sucks. There could be any number of reasons your fine city has turned into Crackville. Fix that, and the schools will fix themselves.

These are the problems with schools. Everybody knows what has to be done to fix them. The hard part is forcing them to do it.

This isn't a game or something that is fixed by simply throwing money at. It is a social problem first and foremost. The culture of this country does not appreciate education, and the idea of studying as hard as South Koreans or Japanese is seen as if it were child abuse or something like that.

Look at Japan, South Korean, Germany, Finland. Copy, adapt, rinse and repeat. Moreover, for changes specific to our country, I would suggest the following:

1. Get rid of summer school (or provide vouchers for low-income people to put their kids in summer camps.)

2. From that above, increase the number of school hours during the year, like in Japan or Germany, or like in almost any other country, developed and otherwise.

3. Teach kids to stand up when a teacher enters and leaves a room, and teach them, no, put them to clean their own class rooms as part of their daily school day.

4. Give teachers better pay and better training.

5. Don't pass kids to the next grade unless they have actually demonstrated they are capable off. Enough of giving HS degrees to kids who LITERALLY cannot read or add fractions.

6. De-emphasize 4-year college degrees. Instead, emphasize vocational training at the HS and community college level. That is, implement something akin to that the Germans and Japanese have.

7. Increase the number of commercials that laud education. Increase the number of educational programs (.ie. musicals and documentaries) in TV. Compare the number of educational programs and commercials in Japanese TV to ours, and you'll see the difference.

Do that and in a generation you'll see a change, all without throwing the coffers out of the window and without looking for the next e-silver bullet.

You can throw billions at the problem, but if we don't change our culture and the basic nature of our curricula, it ain't gonna count for shit.

The biggest difference is the process by which you become a teacher in these countries. Entry into teacher preparation is very competitive, e.g. in Korea you must be in the top 10% of your graduating class. And a fair number of those admitted don't make it to graduation.. So the situation is much more like med school. And how do you get the top 10% to become teachers? You keep the tuition cost minimal. You pay them commensurate to this level of skill. Compared to the US where most Ed programs are self selecting and the gateway is paying your tuition and perhaps passing some form of standardized test.

Yes there are bad teachers, just as there are bad police, fireman, secretaries, (your job here), etc. It very popular today to attack teachers and characterized them as lazy leaches on the public teat. For the vast majority of teacher this is a very unfair characterization. They put in long hours, far beyond the typical 7.5 hours or so of the school day. The majority of them take money out their own pockets to have class supplies. And maintaining the license requires continuing education, almost always at their own cost. And the pay is not really that great, the promised retirement benefits help to offset the low pay. Personally I find that money spend on teachers is far less abhorrent than the rather generous salaries paid to various politicians.

  And there has only been one research project that looked at student performance and the strength of teacher unions. And in that research there was a positive between strong unions and higher SAT scores. Of the 5 states that don't have any teacher unions, only Virginia score in the middle in terms of SAT, graduation rates and NEAP score. The other 4 non-union states are clustered at the bottom.

Okay, here's a real world example. The New York City public school system has roughly 2000 teachers in what's known as "the rubber room." They have been removed from the classroom for a variety of reasons from poor performance to criminal activity. The union contract requires that they A) keep their job, B) get their full salary and benefits. Mayor Bloomberg wants to fire them but legally can't. Many types of unions have rubber rooms particularly the UAW. And people wonder why GM crashed and burned, was propped up by the taxpayers without them getting a say in the matter, turned over to the union who gets a tax credit for the losses before the bailout and they still can't get profitable.

In New Jersey, the following procedure must be followed in order to fire a teacher. Time involved: 2 to 5 years.
http://www.publicschoolspending.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/New-Jersey-Tenure-chart.pdf [publicschoolspending.com]

But to be more specific, the union isn't the only problem. Collective bargaining is a bigger problem. Imagine if you wanted to buy eggs but by law you weren't allowed open the carton to make sure none of them were cracked or spoiled. Not only that but you were required to buy a gross of eggs every week but you're a single person. And then to add insult to injury, you were required to save the shells and dispose of them in a government approved landfill for which you had to pay a maintenance fee until the shells completely decompose.

Meh, can't really see much that AI-teacherbots could do that TV-instruction already failed to do in the 70s. Other than just divert resources away from more traditional teaching resources.

Teaching isn't a respected profession in the US (read about how they're treated in Finland). The few teachers that do stick it out pretty much do so on principle until their morale is beat down by administration and lack of resources. They face strict quotas on pencils and copier paper, and annual fads where everyone and their monkeys drop by to tell them exactly how to do their jobs down to where they write the objective on the board and the minimum number of flyers to have on their bulletin boards. The good teachers I've met are very internally motivated, and usually have very supportive spouses with "real" jobs (incidentally, they also tend to be smokin' hot). The rest eventually burn out and sit back and decide to just give as good as they get, which isn't terribly much. Trying something different is typically punished or at the very least not rewarded.

Every once in a while (actually, all the time, it seems) someone comes around and wants to throw a magic bullet at the problem... "oh, if only every child had textbooks, let's throw all this money at textbook publishers!", "oh, if only every child had TV instruction, let's put VCRs in every classroom!", "oh, let's put computers in every classroom, but not really provide a way to use them productively", "oh, if only no child was left behind, let's make them take a month's worth of standardized testing and threaten to fire everyone if their scores don't show Acceptable Yearly Progress!", "oh, let's buy everyone iPads!" (OK, my teacher wife actually sort of liked the last one, because they actually provided decent training and she can use it as a ridiculously expensive workaround for not having a decent pen & paper quota)

But really, the things that have the greatest impact on the students are the things that are closest to the students: their parents, their teachers, their classmates. Invest in improving those first.

Sure technology could help improve productivity, if they have a decent IT department -- just like any other profession. Technology might enhance, but is not going to effectively replace teaching... it happens to be a very human, social interaction. Sheesh, even the Diamond Age featured a human prostitute/teacher ractive for interaction.

Disclaimer: I support public education; I married a teacher

Quantum mechanics, special relativity and general relativity are all very hard to learn, in part because they are so counterintuitive. Imagine a computer game which throws you into a universe where SR (or quantum mechanics or GR) have large, easily measurable effects - e.g. the speed of light is about 50m/s. After you've spent enough time zipping around on your relativistic motorcycle shooting zombies (or whatever), you should be able to intuitively understand SR, and the mathematics will become easy. (Well, as easy as Newtonian physics, anyhow.)

I teach in Japan, so I would not recommend it as a model. As a matter-of-fact, here in Osaka they are lauding the idea of adopting the "No Child Left Behind" model, I kid you not. Education over here is very, very broken. And that's *with* the teeth of the teachers' unions pulled (they're banned from striking), so good luck thinking that union-busting is going to do you any good, either. The only reason that Japan scores higher is the ridiculous amount of money that parents throw away on cram schools, where the real education is done. You could do away with public education altogether in Japan for all the good it does anybody.

By the way, to dispel some of your other misconceptions about Japanese education:

1. Kids here do stand up when the teacher enters or leaves. That has zero impact on anything, including actual respect for the teacher. It just teaches the kids that if they follow certain societal niceties they can get away with anything.

2. Vocational training at Japanese schools is restricted to dedicated vocational schools. They are considered the last place you want to teach because discipline is terrible and student behavior worse.

3. Commercials that laud education on TV in Japan? No such thing. Commercials in Japan are just as rampant as on American television, and just as vapid. There are a couple of channels run by NHK that offer educational programming, but they're dedicated channels; easily avoided by kids who aren't interested.

I don't think this X-Prize nonsense is going to get anywhere, but I don't think that you should be looking to Japan for advice, either. They've attempted to model themselves after the Germans and, failing that, are going after the Americans now. The real problems in the US and Japan are the administrative bureaucrats who haven't actually ever taught, and the fact that people blame teachers for EVERYTHING. You would never blame a PE teacher for your kid being less physically capable than other kids, because bodies are easy to judge. However, trying to make schools crank out grade-A students by tweaking some sort of magical formula that works for everyone is nonsense, too. Some kids are better at certain subjects; some are worse. Some have discipline problems because they don't fit well into rigid systems; some because their parents neglect them, or worse, beat them.

Do you know what the magic bullet is? Tailor-make curriculums for each child based on what he or she can and cannot do. We have the resources and the technology; stop treating everyone like they're cookie-cutter equal, because they're not. The best thing you could do for a kid who is academically challenged is give him more attention, and those who can self-study less; in that way, you're much more likely to bring them up to a similar level in the end, or at least put them in a place where they'll actually learn things that will enable to live a fulfilling life based on their true aptitude.

And stop grading kids on a curve. it only hides the problem and punishes success. Worst idea ever.

I used to teach undergraduates when I was doing my PhD and this is what I saw, from both being a student, and being an instructor

The whole thing about education has failed miserably

In many schools (from Primary School to High School to University), the curriculum was essentially "copied" from each others

Essentially, everybody has been copying curriculum from everybody else

Like in math --- Why in hell they make calculus a mandatory subject for students who are interested in mathematics ?

Students would surely benefit more from learning statistics than they would from calculus

Look around if you don't believe me --- how many universities put more emphasis on statistics than on calculus ?

I don't know about child abuse, but... from Mamoru Iga, "Suicide of Japanese Youth" (Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, v.11, Issue 1, pp.17-30): "The uniquely intense stress due to the Examination Hell (shiken jigoku) not only generates a basic drive for Japan's economic success but also contributes to a high rate of young people's suicide."

Why would anyone who qualified as the best or the brightest want to be a teacher in the United States?