How do we improve schools so that kids learn more?
It’s a straightforward question — deceptively so, because improving schools, measuring whether you have improved schools, and writing down a recipe for school improvements that can be successfully used elsewhere is an astonishingly hard problem.
Philanthropists in the US have spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting massive overhauls of the education system, often without improving test scores even a bit. Investing in “small schools” didn’t produce the hoped-for gains; neither did pushes to video and evaluating teachers or personalized learning programs. Educators, meanwhile, have protested that test scores don’t even measure the thing we really care about, which is whether students are successfully learning.
Internationally, the situation is even worse. In many parts of the world, lots of kids don’t even get the chance to attend school — and the ones who do often attend profoundly inadequate schools. By age 10, 90 percent of children in low-income countries still cannot read with comprehension. Some schools combat extraordinary rates of teacher absenteeism. Kids can go years barely learning anything because of an inadequate educational environment.
Lots of things have been tried to improve education in the developing world. Nonprofits, governments, and researchers have bought students uniforms, paid their scholarships, bought CONTINUE READING: The best way to improve schools? Invest in teachers. - Vox
