Three students can be educated in New York City's regular education program for what it costs the city to educate a single special education student. Conventional, fact-oriented, and fragmented curricula further deaden the creativity needed to improve schools. Meanwhile, poor feedback about school and student achievement prevents teachers from measuring and improving their performance. The education system routinely fails to adapt to the needs of the external world. Consequently, parents, communities, and taxpayers have a bewildering array of contradictory requirements that educators and administrators fail to acknowledge, let alone answer.
Education does a poor job of assessing why, when, and how it needs to change.
Unlike business, where research leads to new products to sell, the education system lacks incentives to supply or demand better practices. While the average investment in all U.S. companies on research is three percent of their budget and the military spends 13 percent, federal research and development in education amounts to a minuscule 0.1 percent of spending. Schools rely heavily on extrinsic factors, such as regulations and pay, to motivate educators, incentives that are much less effective than intrinsic ones, such as desire to do a good job and pride in one's own professionalism. Teachers' salaries are determined by years of service, not quality of instruction, and districts base hiring and purchasing decisions on mechanical criteria and low standards. Rather it argues that evidence over two decades shows student performance is stable, with higher scores on standardized tests for basic skills balanced by lower scores on measurements of reasoning abilities.