The New York Times Magazine has issued its annual “Year in Ideas,” a sort of Time Magazine Man of the Year for people with pointy heads. Three education ideas make the eclectic list alongside Ecuador’s move to recognize plants’ rights, airbags to protect senior citizens from injuries in falls, spray-on condoms, and the Sean Avery Rule, which prohibits a hockey player from deliberately blocking the opposing goalie’s view.
A paper by a pair of economists, David Deming of Harvard’s Kennedy School and the University of Michigan’s Susan Dynarski, noted that the trend of kindergarten “redshirting,” holding childen out of school for a year, is accelerating. Economic ripple effects from redshirting could affect the long-term solvency of Social Security, the economists noted. The Aspirnaut Initiative, a pilot project to turn rural students’ long bus rides into learning time, also makes the list, as does Michelle Rhee’s proposal to create different pay tiers for Washington, DC teachers.
The basic deal: surrender some job security in exchange for the potential to earn a much higher salary. Under the pro-posed contract, each Washington teacher would choose between two alternatives. The red tier, the more cautious option, would require teachers to give up a few seniority protections in exchange for a considerable pay increase. Teachers choosing the riskier green tier would lose even more tenure and seniority rights. They would spend the first year of the new contract on probation, at the end of which they could be fired. But if they were good enough to survive, they would receive huge raises, before long earning as much as $131,000 a year in salary and performance bonuses, more than twice the average salary for an American public-school teacher.
Ideas that gained traction in 2008 that did not make the list: national standards, paying students for attendance and grades, and “new paternalism” schools.
Update: Jay Greene offers his list of Big Ideas here.
