Abolishing Teaching Standards Means Better Teachers
The New Yorker recently published an article by Malcolm Gladwell that affirmed the importance of educational reform. Gladwell effectively changed the focus of the reform debate from developing a better academic curriculum to developing a better way of selecting teachers. He proposed the creation of an apprenticeship system similar to what is used in the financial advice field. This however creates a problem that Gladwell didn't assign a feasible solution to. He acknowledges the fact that an apprenticeship system would turn paying teachers into an expensive process for tax payers, but his solution that “An apprentice should get apprentice wages” (Gladwell) is not articulate enough to be put into practice. If a teacher spends a large amount of time/money on becoming trained to teach, they are going to expect higher wages. The United States needs the cost to be less expensive for teachers to meet the apprenticeship prerequisites, which can make the cost of paying teachers less expensive. We can do this by lowering/abolishing current teaching standards, the most logical solution to the education problem in the U.S.
Recent headlines have been calling for educational reform throughout the United States. This reaction can be attributed partially to surveys such as the one conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The U.S. scored well below average in many of the categories of the 2006 PISA assessment (U.S. Department of Education). This was surprising to many considering the fact that the U.S. spends nearly three times as much money on a student than does some of the countries ranked higher. So the facts are clear, the U.S. has an education problem. But the new dilemma is, how should it be solved. Gladwell tries to point out that the current point in education reform being stressed is not what needs...