[donw]

I don't think that would make a difference.

Incentives are whack across the board in education.

At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself.

We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that looks like in-practice.

[astrange]

We aren't approaching any kind of end stage anywhere in anything.

As a guy said once, there are neither beginnings or endings to the wheel of time.

[WalterBright]

Hence the vehement opposition to the idea, sadly.

[donw]

Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference.

The only thing that works is school choice. If parents can choose the schools, the schools have to deliver results.

[WalterBright]

> Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference.

If they don't make a difference, then there won't be any payouts to make. It's a can't-lose proposal.

[sokoloff]

I’m generally supportive of finding ways to better use the talent of teachers and if paying incentives is part of that, great.

But this claim is pretty absurd. Imagine that payoffs (in a poorly designed system) are based on a random number generator. That won’t have any lasting, society-wide effect (I suspect you agree), but would result in some payouts.

Incentive design is the difficult nut here, but if cracked, there’s a lot of value to the next generations.

[lacrimacida]

Designed incentives can look good on paper but in reality they get gamed a lot until they are insignificant or detrimental to the final outcome.

[davidgay]

> The only thing that works is school choice.

Citation needed.

[throw9away6]

School choice only works because you can choose to not be in a school with high need kids. The public schools can’t choose their student so it’s a huge disadvantage

[s1artibartfast]

That's a feature not a bug and public school districts should do the same.

Because districts are required to provide education to all students, they should establish special schools that are essentially prisons for children with behavioral issues or daycares for the mentally handicapped to segment the student population when necessary.

[throw9away6]

I don’t think the parents of the kids sent off to prison and daycare would be all to happy with that outcome. Usually schools that do that do it in a way that doesn’t draw too much attention. It doesn’t take many pissed off parents to tilt the scales in a local election.

[s1artibartfast]

It also makes a lot of parents happy. A lot of it comes down to political inertia and the dominance of reactionism.

If you have a system with a dedicated school for violent and behaviorally challenged kids, there would be a much larger number of angry parents reacting to the idea of integrating those students with their children.

[bandrami]

DC has been doing full school choice for 20 years now. So your bold innovative goal is to "be like DCPS in the early 2000s".

That's gonna go over great in Fairfax County.